Choosing a forum

A forum?

People have been asking for a web forum. It could provide the following benefits:

• People could chat among themselves and figure out their own ideas for making open source a more fun place.
  • In general, it would help people have more conversations on the OpenHatch site. So as a group, we could discuss neat game-mechanics ideas, that sort of thing.
• People could discuss their problems getting involved with projects.
  • People could say, "Hey, I found this bitesize bug and got stuck -- what do I do next?" and have a decent chance of someone answering.

It would have the following costs:

• We'd have to maintain a forum.
• People will flame us and say that mailing lists are the answer to all of life's problems.

Okay, so which forum?

Vanilla Forum

• Pros:
  • Looks friendly by default
  • Nice, friendly, lightweight look
  • Decent story for user integration with Django
  • Could run it on a different web server, etc., since it's not Django
  • Mature forum software, presumably with features and stability
• Can generate an RSS feed for a forum
• Cons:
  • Since it's not Django, we'd have to try harder to maintain skinning
  • If we want to incorporate Vanilla items into the front page activity feed, we'd have to try harder.
  • No mailing list integration

DjangoBB

• Pros:
  • Looks like nicest Django web forum
• Cons:
  • Would have to run it on the main server, meaning it could worsen load problems

FUDForum

• Pros:
  • Email list integration!
• Can generate an RSS feed for a forum
• Cons:
  • Ugly by default (but it's actually quite skinnable)

Phorum

• Pros:
  • Email list integration. Use two addon modules:
  • http://www.phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?62,140380 and http://www.phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?62,129244,129244#msg-129244