Goals

To provide a set 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.

...

Hypernews has been used extensively by Babar, and is now also used by Geant4, Atlas CMS and LSST. It has been is very popular with users, especially the threaded discussiondiscussions, 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

One of the most popular forum distributions. Used by many sites including RootTalk: http://root.cern.ch/phpBB3/^{Image Added}. Does not support threaded discussions.

Implementation: PHP

FUDForum

Slightly more feature rich than phpbb (http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/FUDforum+phpBB^{Image Added})

Implementation: PHPImplementation: PHP

Confluence xxx plugin

Implementation: Confluence plugin

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

Web Links:

• http://www.forummatrix.org/^{Image Added}

Recommendation

We should set up a limited forum trial to gauge user feedback. Limited means no initial commitment to long-term support. The easiest thing to set up would be