Neighborhood Forum
I have been asked to set up a forum for our building. Before I set out to reinvent the wheel, I'd suggest you have a look at Simon Waddington's excellent Jack London District Forum first. I think it meets our needs nicely, don't you?
Comments
No, I don't. In fact, I question the request.
We already have a mailing list and a blog... why do we need a forum as well? In particular, I think that our group is too small and too quiet for a pull-based medium like a discussion forum to be valuable. If a forum doesn't have a minimum level of traffic (and that number is generally measured in posts per day rather than posts per week), it fallls off of people's radar and the traffic drops to near-zero. My guess is that a forum would get almost no use at all.
For a group our size, a push-based medium (like the mailing list that we already have) is a better solution than a web-based forum.
Disclaimer and qualifications: I make my living running discussion forums, and I've been active in online discussion groups of various sorts for 22 years. I spend a lot of time watching this stuff and thinking about what works and what doesn't.
Posted by: Patti | February 22, 2006 8:43 PM
An excellent, light-weight forum software package is punBB (http://www.punbb.org/). Not as fully featured, but fast!
Posted by: Eric Cheng | March 27, 2006 3:28 PM