History/CouchSurfingForum
The CouchSurfing Wiki, an informal workspace which anyone can edit.
The current Groups feature could be expanded into a fully fledged forum, CouchSurfingForum. The Discussion about implementing forums is long, there are also a lot of people who don't want to give up groups, see the summary Groups vs. Forums
Contents |
Why
Modern forums have far more sophisticated features than the current Groups system. Some examples:
- Allow users to subscribe to individual threads of interest to them
- Allow users to choose their own notification settings (one email for every message, digest, no emails, etc)
- Discussions can be archived and easily searched
In addition, it would be easier to access the information within the messages in a forum format. It's possible to read messages posted without joining the group. It's not possible to post anything before joining though.
Why Not
- It may create complications in the codebase. It may be difficult to implement.
How
integration with free forum software
My initial suggestion would be to integrate an open source forum like phpBB or similar. phpBB is extremely popular, it's a mature, stable, well developed appliation and there are examples of it being integrated into other systems.
For example, there is a module for postNuke which automatically adds a phpBB forum based on the same user database. This may offer a good starting point to integreate phpBB with the CS user database.
Comments
- We might have LiquidThreads in this wiki at some point. Guaka 10:44, 12 September 2006 (EST)
