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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)
Existing systems in use at SLAC and similar institutes
Mailing lists
majordomo system has been installed and in use at SLAC for some time.
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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.
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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
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/
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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.
Implementation: PHP
Confluence "Community Bubbles" plugin
https://www.adaptavist.com/display/Bubbles/Forums
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Implementation: Third-party 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
- Searchable (preferably integrated with general site web search)
Web Links:
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