On 8/15/07, Dan Bolser <dan.bolser(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That is very nice, but it's clearly an attempt to
crunje MW into
something resembling a discussion forum. Given that the concept,
requirements and implementation of discussion forums are essentially
solved problems, why is it necessary to attempt to re-develop them
all?
The underlying philosophy requires it. The assumption here is not that
traditional forums are "more or less perfect", but that they suck in
many different ways, and that a solution combining the merits of
traditional forums & wikis is needed. LQT is different from forums in
a few ways:
- threads have to be wiki-summarized to be archived
- threads are attached to wiki pages (which are shown as headers)
- every comment is a regular wiki page
- the thread as a whole has a history so that you can see what changes
were made over time (comments added, deleted, moved, edited, etc.)
- integrates with standard wiki features (wiki syntax, custom signatures, etc.)
Most importantly it's designed to transition existing article-focused
discussions in a wiki to a threaded system, which would be much harder
if you just roped phpBB into a wiki. I.e. we want a system that can be
realistically deployed on Wikipedia talk pages.
My idea is to have MW for articles, and flip to an
instance of
something like PHPBB for the discussion tab, Allowing users to start
new threads, comment on existing threads, etc. etc. Some discussion of
this kind of integration was going on on the punBB forums. I wonder if
anything similar is being suggested elsewhere?
I believe Wikia is experimenting with integrating phpBB, including
hooking the MW parser into the phpBB comment submission. Angela
(beesley at gmail dot com) may know more.
--
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik
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