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

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: _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l