[Mediawiki-l] Forum software (e.g. phpBB or similar) integration to replace talk pages

[Matt England]

I'm not sure if I know the entire context of this thread, however, I'll 
give my 2 cents:

I think the entire world of discussion management mechanisms (email lists, 
forums, Usenet newsgroups...and now wiki talk pages) are far too 
segragated.  I believe that underlying designs should have a concept of a 
"vehicle-independent" conversational/discussion content (the discussion 
threads) with delivery-specific mechanisms (email and forums and 
newsgroups, etc).

Unfortunately, hardly anyone or anything does this...and the world goes 
merrily on with all sorts of segragated conversations about the same things 
but divided only because one group conversation is a newsgroup, one is a 
web forum, one is a wiki, and one is a mailing list.

I have been on a short-term mission to find things that bridge the gap, and 
the only thing I've been successful with thus far is http://mail2forum.com 
(and its cousin named CM2F) that links email lists (of any flavor, Mailman, 
ezmlm, majordomo, etc) to phpBB forums.  (I tried to get the vBulletin 
people to do this, but I was inexplicably rebuffed, imho).

I would LOVE to get my MediaWiki site to "bridge" its talk pages into my 
phpBB forum (and therefore my GNUMailman lists); life would be much easier 
for my communities (which are currently software development groups behind 
a firewall).

For the medium term (like 3 months to 2 years) I think this is feasible by 
doing the mail2forum.com kind of stuff.  However, for the long term 
"delivery agnostic" bridge control of discussions, I was thinking of 
throwing a site together for a collaboration point for the leaders of all 
the different tools and asking them to help develop a specification for how 
to do this...if everyone could manage to buy in to this principle.  Who 
knows, maybe someone else is trying to do this...but I haven't seen it, and 
I've looked a LONG time.

For now I'm at least trying to leverage mail2forum.com.  I anxiously away 
anything that could integrate MediaWiki talk pages into phpBB as well.

-Matt


At 6/3/2005 04:57 PM, Julian Rendell wrote:
>Hi there-
>I've done some searching and seen some mock-ups, and a few hints that
>people have succeeded, but does anyone have a concrete guide for how
>to integrate some kind of forum software into mediawiki to replace the
>talk pages?
>
>Or I guess a second best would be the ability to easily (e.g. via
>interwiki?) integrate a seperate forum site into mediawiki links, and
>also an easy way to create wiki-like links in the forum posts that
>link back to the wiki.
>
>Any suggestions appreciated-
>
>Regards
>
>Julian
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