Dear Russ.
As an end user, I would like to know if there is any forward progress on doing something about the CentOS forums?
whatever forward means --
You don't like it for various reasons; a post in the first Forum thread listed from a centos devel was made, and no trial implementation indicating satisfaction with the criteria was made that I can see
I would add [with the benefit of time and knowing what is happening in the broader Open Source world] to z00dax' comment, that it should support federated authentication [ldap,OpenID, whatever]; show a low attack surface history at the CVE; be in active maintenance or better, development; be in a language permitting addon extensibility without having to 'marry' the darn thing; and permit 'static' top pages to address 'slashdotting'. Does it integrate well with puppet, mailman, and stock CentOS tools; is it Free and Open Source software using CentOS stock supporting packages?
This apparently has came up time and again, with various examples being given of the deficiencies of the existing setup (depending on your point of view).
I saw chatter and grumbling between people who like 'pull content' such as forums
As near as I can tell the general consensus seems to be 'yes, something needs to be done'
And the mice voted to bell the cat. If all noses are of equal value and no cost is placed on voting and no cost is imputed to the effort needed to make changes, then sure those choosing to speak as to a proposed change (without doing anything to further it) I suppose there is 'general consensus' in favor of said change. But all I see from the talkers, is talk; nothing prevents any of the talkers from doing in a sandbox somewhere, so far as I know.
Besides just talking, let's take a look at the facts:
Sample implementation has already been done. LDAP bind works fine, User creation is not possible from the application, so there needs to be coded something for.
We have written a migration script to port newbb content to phpbb which is documented well and can be found here:
http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums/newbb_to_phpbb
phpBB theming process has been started, but stalled a bit as we are moving forward to a common visual style:
http://wiki.centos.org/ArtWork/Style/Web/Default
If you got any further questions concerning what has already been done, feel free to ask.
Best Regards Marcus