[chandler-users] Recommendations for Web Forums?

[Delphine Ménard]

Hello Mimi,

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 19:58, Mimi Yin <mimi at osafoundation.org> wrote:
> We are finally getting around to setting up a Web Forum. (Woohoo!) While
> rooting around looking for different solutions, I came across Tangler, a web
> forum that supports discussion threads *and* live chat. Tangler also hosts
> the web forum and allows you to embed the forum in your own site, which
> would make the whole thing more feasible as far as set up and maintenance
> are concerned.
>
> Does anyone else have any recommendations? Examples of web forums you felt
> were especially well done? Tangler doesn't seem to have any way to
> categorize or tag topics which would be nice given the rate at which we
> accumulate content. It supports search, but I don't know how well it works.
>
> http://www.tangler.com/
>
> Here's an example web forum:
> http://www.tangler.com/forum/weewar/topic/21808#

I am not a big fan of this forum. All the examples I have tried are
extremely slow to load and therefore not practical. It's loading....
for ever. The posts on the right side of the screen mean scrolling
down to get to the end of the messages, instead of browsing through
pages. I didn't find it very intuitive.

One example of a forum I find extremely practical is that of dotclear
[1], powered by punbb [2]. Only thing that I don't like is the fact
that the search (in that one anyway) forces you to choose one of the
forums to search into, but that might be a setting you can change.

As far as forums go, I think that the most important things are:
- the search function must be powerful
- the structure possibilities - sticky notes, taglines for different
parts of the forum, etc. (it must be well thought out to start with so
that all can be found easily but it should be highly configurable)
- edit possibilities (possibility of editing your post, change the
subject to solved etc.)
- customization possibilities - it's nice if you can integrate it with
the rest of the documentation, the blog etc.

That's it for my 0.2 euros :)

Delphine



[1]  http://forum.dotclear.net/
[2]http://punbb.informer.com/downloads.php
>
> Mimi
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