Subject: BPFK: Call for volunteers: discussion board setup

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 17:27:57 +1100

Lojbanists,

as you know, the BPFK per my definition on the wiki is to transact 
limited discussions on particular cmavo/paradigms, with freer 
discussion moving off to jboske .

As anyone who has been anywhere near jboske in the past three months 
can tell, jboske is unmanageable now, and will get worse, not better.

Since we cannot wait for the Elephant, and we need a more general 
solution anyway, I call on people with savvy about discussion fora to 
find out which discussion board software fulfils the following 
criteria, and can be set up on lojban.org to host threaded discussions. 
This will in the short term solve the jboske problem (well, a jboske 
problem), in the medium term serve as discussion infrastructure for the 
BPFK, and in the long term help whenever all discussion on Lojban 
matters blows up.

The main concern is that threads going at the same time and in 
different directions do not allow people to follow who said what where, 
and what is currently debated. The solution is to be able to browse one 
thread on one page. I believe discussion fora are the answer. I have 
some specific requirements I think we need for such software:

All the content on one topic is in the one place, and is threaded.

Preferably there is some hierarchical structure of topics (so there are 
subtopics and trees)

There is some way to flag posts as being of particular kinds (proposed 
solutions, chat, whatever)

There is some way of extracting the text of discussion into an archive 
readily.

New posts to the board can be forwarded to a mailing list.

If anyone knows of software meeting these criteria, please let me know. 
I'll review, and pass on which I think make sense to Robin, to put up 
on lojban.org, on a trial basis.

If noone knows off hand about good discussion forum software, and has 
much too much time on their hands, they can start trawling through a 
list like http://www.thinkofit.com/webconf/forumsoft.htm .

Obviously, we're really only interested in Unix, OpenSource, freeware 
programs.

--
Dr Nick Nicholas [Stephen] King published _The Green Mile_ as
Research Assistant the first serialized novel since the 1920s,
French & Italian in a gesture that was meant to recall the
University of Melbourne serial work of Dickens. No doubt, King is the
Australia Dickens this century deserves.
[email-masked] -- Richard von Busack, _Metro Santa Cruz_,
http://www.opoudjis.net Dec. 8-15 1999, p. 29.