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.

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

http://hypernews.slac.stanford.edu/^{Image Removed}

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/^{Image Removed}

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.

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Open-source forum software: http://fudforum.org/forum/^{Image Removed}

Already in use at SLAC for some forums like http://forum.linercollider.org/^{Image Removed}

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^{Image Removed}

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.

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