[Wikitech-l] TaxAlmanac Discussion Forum

I stumbled across the recent discussion on this list regarding the TaxAlmanac Discussion Forum and thought I'd join in and participate in the discussion. My name is Tim Doyle, and I am the moderator for the TaxAlmanac wiki (http://www.taxalmanac.org), and also responsible for driving the effort to launch our discussion forums. Our forum was launched mid-November last year and has been a great success for us. Our customers have found it much easier to use than the standard talk pages. Contributions to the site increased dramatically shortly after we launched these forums. Let me take a stab at answering some of the comments from the earlier discussion thread: Erik Moeller wrote: We wanted our discussion forum to be built into / based on standard MediaWiki pages, which allows for links to other articles, enables searches, and also encourages users to become familiar with the wiki in general. We created a namespace specifically for these discussions, and added categories to the topic pages so that they could be segmented into different discussion categories. This approach allows us to easily move a discussion from one category to another, or to add it to multiple categories. We used a set of templates on the site to define what is added to new topics or when other users reply. These refer to other templates which then work with a modified monobook.css to define how the pages actually look. phil.boswell at gmail wrote: discussions" That is correct. We wrote another extension which returns a current list of articles within a specified namespace, and optionally filtered on a given category. We can also pass in the number of items to return, the name of a template to apply to the results to customize the look of the results, etc. ecable at avxw wrote: You succeeded. Regarding the source code, it is not currently available, but we are currently reviewing if we should do this. I will keep you informed. We've been approached by Jimmy on this issue, so you can be assured that we are taking the requests seriously. timwi at gmx wrote: I'm not sure why you consider our approach a 'hack' or hard to maintain. Could you explain? Platonides at gmail wrote: ;) Platonides got it basically correct. As far as how we protect against incorrect syntax, any characters, such as "}" or "|" which might adversely affect the discussion posts are converted to HTML entities before they are written to the page. Of course users could edit the page using the standard wiki editing mechanism, but we have not found this to be a problem. On the few occasions where someone has made a mistake here, they typically fix it very quickly. Yes, it is possible for someone to vandalize the discussions in this way, but we would deal with that as we would with any other type of vandalism. I'd be very interested to hear more from the community, and I look forward to participating in the discussions! Thank you, Tim Doyle