[CentOS-devel] Forums

Wed Aug 8 16:28:27 UTC 2012
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 08/08/12 17:01, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 08/08/2012 04:50 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:50 AM, Karanbir Singh<mail-lists at karan.org>  wrote:
>>> Hi Guys,
>>>
>>> Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the
>>> moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish
>>> list at this time ?
>>
>> What are described in :
>>
>> http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums
>>
>> are largely true today.
>>
>> "The specific requirements raised by the present www.centos.org forum users"
>>
>> - Multiple persistent logins: so people can login from multiple
>> machines with the same username/password at the same time
>> - Remember read/unread posts across multiple PCs/logins per user, not
>> per machine
>> - View first unread post within thread feature
>> - Ability for users to change/edit their registered email address
>> - Better management of subscribed threads
>

I agree. We had these discussions ages ago. Nothing has changed since 
then from my perspective. The results of those discussions is summarised 
here:

http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums

> is there any software out there that meets all this specs ?
>

Probably not - there are always compromises. That said, IIRC the options 
were evaluated and phpBB came out on top as most other serious 
contenders were eliminated based on their license conditions.

As a user the best forums I have ever used have almost exclusively been 
vBulletin, which has always been a non-starter for CentOS as it's not 
free/open source. Simple Machines is another that features quite highly 
but failed the license requirements. At which point you are really 
plucking solutions from towards the bottom of the tree.

> What are the top 5, most wellrun forums' around the world ( according to
> the forum admins ) ?
>