Goals

To provide a web based mechanism to encourage communication between SLAC employees and collaborators with common interests, and to encourage people to discover common interests that they did not know they had. The system should encourage top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer communication.

Desired features

  • Easy to see what topics exist, create new topics
  • Threaded discussions
  • Ability to include or link to images, documents etc
  • Usable via web and/or e-mail
  • Integrates with (some) existing login mechanism
    • Accessible by collaborators without SLAC accounts?
  • Ability to have both public and non-public forums
  • WYSIWYG editor
  • Searchable (preferably integrated with general site web search)
  • Reliable, Secure, Easy to maintain

Existing systems in use at SLAC and similar institutes

Mailing lists

majordomo system has been installed and in use at SLAC for some time.

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/majordomo/majordomo-basic.html

LWGate software at SLAC provides very limited web access:

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/

People often refrain from using mailing lists because of the fear of "spamming" people not interested in a specific topic and instead just send e-mail to a random list of people.

Hypernews

Hypernews has been used extensively by Babar, and is now also used by Geant4, CMS and LSST.

http://hypernews.slac.stanford.edu/

It is very popular with users, especially the threaded discussions, ability for users to browse existing discussions and opt-in to those that interest them and the ability to receive and respond to messages either via the web or e-mail. The implementation of hypernews is somewhat old and no longer being actively developed.

Implementation: Perl

PHPBB

http://www.phpbb.com/

One of the most popular open-source forum distributions. Used by many sites including RootTalk: http://root.cern.ch/phpBB3/. Does not support threaded discussions.

Implementation: PHP

FUDForum (Fast Uncompromising Discussion Forum)

Open-source forum software: http://fudforum.org/forum/

Already in use at SLAC for some forums like http://forum.linercollider.org/

Slightly more features than phpbb (http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/FUDforum+phpBB). The forum supports all of the features we want (and many more). We have not enabled ability to respond to topics via e-mail, since it requires setting up a new e-mail address for each forum, but it is supported and could be handled in the same way that we currently deal with hypernews forums.

Current installation does not use integrated login, but it is supported via a simple php intgration point: http://cvs.prohost.org/index.php/Login_integration. How easy would it be to implement this at SLAC?

Implementation: PHP

Confluence "Community Bubbles" plugin

https://www.adaptavist.com/display/Bubbles/Forums

Adds forum capabilities to confluence. Currently installed on confluence-new. Integrates with confluence login mechanism and integrates nicely with other confluence functionality. Anyone who can edit a page can add a forum using the {forum} macro. Does not support all of the functionality of a dedicated forum, for example e-mail notification is based on confluence page or space views, cannot respond to topics via e-mail.

Implementation: Third-party confluence plugin

Web Links:

Recommendation

We should set up a limited forum trial to gauge user interest. Limited means no initial commitment to long-term support.

#trackbackRdf ($trackbackUtils.getContentIdentifier($page) $page.title $trackbackUtils.getPingUrl($page))
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4 Comments

  1. Richard Dubois

    For FUDForum integrated login - do you still need to create local accounts? I would presume yes, at least to customise a profile etc. But authentication is via single sign-on? 

  2. Unknown User (imre)

    Requirements

    • Easy to see what topics exist, create new topics
    • Advanced topics features (sticky, locked, active list)
    • Threaded discussions
    • Ability to include or link to images, documents etc.
    • Integration with common identity stores and federation tools
    • Support both SLAC employees and  SLAC collaborators
    • Ability to have both public and non-public forums
    • WYSIWYG editor
    • Integrate with our enterprise search solution (IDOL), search on topics, authors etc.
    • Align with our IT technologies and support models:
      • Db:  MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server
      • OS: RHEL5, Solaris or Windows Server 2008 R2
      • Platforms:  SharePoint, Confluence
      • Middleware: IIS,  Apache
      • Development frameworks:  Java, PHP, ASP .Net
      • HA: Hyper-V, F5 etc.
    • Ability to scale to support  4000+ SLAC employees and users
    • Solid vendor support and/or active support community
    • Provide safe change management for installs and mods (test environment etc.)
    • Automatic message archiving
    • Support  portable devices (lo-fi mode)
    • Provide tools to block spam (captcha etc.)
    • Ability to export forums , threads or individual messages in various formats
    • Push content (RSS, Atom)
    • Advanced forum features (who’s online, polls, shared calendar, forum level themes, analytics, ratings, tagging, bookmarking, print formatting, IM, reply with a quote, unread list  etc.)
    • Ability to manipulate threads (move, split, close)
    • Ability to prevent duplicate threads
    • Granular moderation levels:  global, forum and  thread; ability to delegate moderation
    • Comply with the security and privacy requirements mandated by the SLAC contract

    High level solution Categories:

    Solution types:

    • Point solutions (PHPBB)
    • Part of a broader collaboration or social suite (Jira, Telligent)

    Delivery model:

    • Installs on top of an existing platform (SharePoint – different webparts, Confluence - Bubbles)
    • Hosted Solution (Google Groups)
    • In-house solution:
      • Open Source (FUDForum)
      • Proprietary ( vBulletin, Fusetalk)

    Core technology:

    • PHP
    • ASP .NET
    • Java, ColdFusion, Perl, Python, Ruby

  3. Teresa Downey

    SharePoint Team Discussion is available out of the box.

    Drupal Forums is another option.

    Both are currently supported by OCIO, along with Confluence. Drupal, however, is currently only supported for the Communications department, on a server purchased by Communications dept.

    Teresa

  4. Teresa Downey

    The following responses came from Alf's query to HEPiX community:

    1) Here is a response in German from DESY.  I have appended the Google translation FWIW directly below:

    Hi Alf,

    I am a 'private' admin phpbb forums with a little over 1,000 users and can recommend it. It provides granular role based access and very fine legal structure and actually everything you can imagine what makes sense if you want to host many forums, e.g., good language support. I have mysql behind it and am satisfied. If you very much Change customer needs will be, however, with updates of the changes by hand tighten again, the code is not very modular. However, there is not really a necessity to do so. When I switched I have the whole time was set with 10,000 users and should not a problem, so. Scale There are a few varieties of simplified phpbb coming but surely the question. In the drupal forum is really only one node with 'comment enabled' if you come because profit margins on the functionality of phpbb want you have to re-install about 22 modules and configure, yet still missing some, not so great. However, the updates in drupal made better than phpbb.

    As far as my 2cents;)

    Greetings from HH

    christoph

    2)  Hi Randy,

    Martin Bly just told me that they are using phbb as well.

    -- Alf.

    3)  Alf,

    At ccin2p3 we created a forum space, asked by users too, at the end of last August.

    Up to now, only LAF users (lyon Analysis farm) use it. Cms-fr and Atlas-fr wanted one, but  they did not post anything yet in their own forum. So not a big trafic on it. No bilan has been done yet. We chose PHPBB as forum tool. I don't remember why  but  Hypernews has been discarded soon, by Development team, in charge to find the good choice for these kind of world open tools. I know that PHPBB is quite easy  to install and to customize BUT it's more complicated to maintain if you want to compartmentalize the different forums (acl to read/post) I forward your mail to damien mercier damien.mercier@cc.in2p3.fr) who installed it. Perhaps he can add some specific usefull information. If you contact him, please, keep me in copy, because Damien leave CC-IN2P3 in the next weeks. If you want to see how it looks like : http://cctools.in2p3.fr/ccforum/

    Regards, PhO

    Philippe Olivero            --- philippe.olivero@in2p3.fr

    4) Hi Alf,

    I'd have suspected that todays web 2.0 answer to such a request is: use facebook or twitter ;-)

    at GSI we installed FUDforum back in 2004 as a central service. We took a closer look at phpBB but decided to go for FUDforum mainly because of three features:

    1) unlimited stacking of sub-categories,

    2) support for attachments (I suspect every other tool nowadays can also cope with attachments) and

    3) an email gateway for mailing list integration.

    Anyhow the latter was never put into use until today.

    Maintenance of FUDforum has never been a big issue, as forum moderation and - very fine-grained - group management can be delegated and therefore we still stick with it.

    On the other hand the privilege system is not exactly straight forward and it might be complicated to adapt FUDforum's template system to a corporate website layout. Same applies probably to hooking it into a central authentication system. We never really investigated both yet because of a lack of manpower.

    Another important deficiency is the lack of a  proper export functionality. To move discussions from FUDforum to another system, you have to query the SQL database directly.

    Maybe some of these features were added/improved recently, I did not look at FUDforum 3 yet.

    These are some points to probably keep in mind when choosing the proper solution.

    Kind regards,

         Christopher