Someone said: > Something like Google Groups that was open source would certainly be > nice.
I like phpbb. It's heavy, but it's the most widely used forum software. The older I get, the more I subscribe to the ancient Chinese proverb: 10 million flies can't be wrong. Phpbb can be integrated with mediaWiki, to have the kind of shared authentication I was talking about (participants gain wiki editing status after some number of posts and some amount of time, to guard against a spammer making 10 posts in one night just to spam the wiki). As far as guarding against forum spam (which is the only risk, leading up to validated users who are trusted to edit the wiki), I like a tiered approach: 1. Captcha devices which bots have about a 20% success rate with. 2. Custom profile fields or Q&A which bots aren't programmed to handle. (Change these occasionally to defeat bots that might be customized to handle this particular forum.). 3. Assign new forum members to the group "newly registered users" until they've made 5-10 normal posts over some minimum period of time. 4. For postings by members of "newly registered users," use blacklisting services like Akismet, Spam Karma II and Spam Assassin. - These tools look at the "spamminess" of a post, and return true/false. - If they report a post of spam, place the user in a group of "reported spammers" for moderator review. - If the service gave a false positive, report it to the service (to make the service better), and take the user out of the suspected group. - The result is only a few undetected spam postings for moderators to remove, and report to the service to improve its accuracy. 5. After a participant makes it through that process, they're added to the phpbb group "wiki editors" (which is required for them to be recognized as authenticated at the wiki, along with the site cookie indicating they're authenticated.). Personally, I'd do this on the same host as the wiki. Not Google Groups. Keep it together, and integrated so the two distinct categories of collaboration drive participants/visitors to each other. As I said before, maybe the above is overkill for the size of C::A's following. Or, maybe C::A's following would grow if it moved to something more feature-rich than a "mailing list." Something where a user can see their posts, unread posts, unreplied posts, receive an email notification when a forum has been updated. See new posts via RSS/Atom feeds. It's even possible to create a forum for Wiki changes, and feed updates (diff output) to that forum as a topic for each page. Changes to the Wiki would be more visible as people participate in the other (normal) forums. And, they could watch that forum using RSS, like any other forum. (This duplicates mediaWiki's own features. But, it helps visibility when many people aren't going to visit the wiki often just to see what's happening.). Mark ##### CGI::Application community mailing list ################ ## ## ## To unsubscribe, or change your message delivery options, ## ## visit: http://www.erlbaum.net/mailman/listinfo/cgiapp ## ## ## ## Web archive: http://www.erlbaum.net/pipermail/cgiapp/ ## ## Wiki: http://cgiapp.erlbaum.net/ ## ## ## ################################################################
