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:

• http://www.forummatrix.org/
• http://www.forum-software.org/

Recommendation

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