Open Source Forum software (was PHPBB3)

[Greg Rundlett (freephile)]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> On 12/11/2010 11:51 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:57:50AM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> >> On 12/11/2010 10:03 AM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> >>> On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 08:15:39AM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> >>>> Basically what we want here is to set up an online forum inside the
> >>>> company simply to provide a discussion forum for one of our new
> products
> >>>> that we are supporting out of our office.
> >>> On a gaming forum that I do admin stuff for we used phpBB initially,
> but
> >>> after the 2nd 0-day exploit let some disgruntled kiddie delete our
> >>> database, we switched to PunBB.  It has a much smaller feature set than
> >>> phpBB, but it has worked well for us, and perhaps most importantly we
> >>> haven't had any security issues with it.
> >>>
> >>> PunBB was forked a couple years ago after the initial project was sold
> to
> >>> a commercial company.  fluxBB is the name of the fork, and if I was
> setting
> >>> up a forum today, I'd probably choose between fluxBB and Vanilla, which
> you
> >>> also mentioned.  Vanilla has always looked pretty nice from a features
> and
> >>> aesthetic point of view, but I've never used it.
> >> I found a forum that compares a whole bunch of these,
> >> http://www.forummatrix.org/, and it uses punBB. Neither fluxBB nor
> punBB
> >> support subforums or attachments, and since our system may require some
> >> debugging issues, attachments might be needed. I think that subforums
> >> may also be needed. For instance, SolvencyII is primarily used in EU, we
> >> might have a SolvencyII forum with subforums for UK, France, and other
> >> countries. AEF (http://www.anelectron.com/) seems to have a number of
> >> features. It is not Open Source, but is free software.
> > If you need a lot of attachments, you may be better off
> > installing a good wiki alongside the forum, and making sure it's
> > easy to link to wiki pages.
> >
> I think the issue is that we don't know what we need. Corporate has a
> sharepoint page also. I think probably a light weight forum should
> suffice. I'll install a decent wiki too.
>
>
I'd recommend against installing a wiki and a forum.  If you do, you'll end
up with twice the work and 1/4 the adoption; meaning the initiative will
fail.  Of course if you NEED discussions AND documentation AND files, then I
would recommend fudforum and mediawiki.  What I'm really saying is that you
need to make sure that there is an internal "owner" of the product who has
ample time and incentive to install, configure, extend, maintain, train etc.
on the product.  I don't mean to go off topic but I firmly believe that
organizations do not get value from software until they groom the software
for the value it contains like a farmer grooms the soil for it's potential.
A vanilla install of mw can be done in 15 minutes.  That by itself is worth
a pound of sterile dirt.

I haven't used FUDforum in a long while, but it's always been a favorite of
mine b/c it seems to do everything (e.g. topic threads) (due to proper
abstraction and design?) owing to it's founding by Ilia Ashalnetsky (PHP
core dev and security team member)  It compares favorably to punBB
http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/FUDforum+punBB

hth,

Greg Rundlett



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> Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
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