Online Forums (sic)
Published on 13 Feb 2009 at 12:16 pm.
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I think I’ve almost got used to the use of an English plural on a Latin word. Now where was I? Oh yes, Bulletin Boards, Discussion Boards or whatever.
In theory these should be major tools for collaborative organisations such as associations and charities, especially now that “Web 2.0″ is de rigeur for presidential campaigns. However, not that many associations are using Forums and some of those that are would admit that they function more as a broadcast medium than as an interactive tool.
There are many tools out there. I’ll only mention vBulletin and phpBB here but they are numerous as stand-alone tools and can also be found embedded within other tools such as Content Management Systems like Joomla! and Drupal.
If you are considering adopting one of these tools or even just evaluating them for a pilot project here are some of the considerations that may be relevant:
- Reliability - this is a combination of professional hosting and a great support community. The more popular offerings generally have the best support behind them. Volunteer support is often as good or better than its commercial counterpart. A combination of the two is ideal.
- Usability - this is of course very subjective so you will want to evaluate a few to see when you like.
- Functionality is becoming less important as most of the available tools will do the job. Many features such as the ability to adapt the look and feel are generally avaialable. Watch out for features such as topic threading and see mention of integration below.
- Look and feel/ branding - most of the available tools can be “skinned” with your logo, colours etc and there are plenty of off the shelf themes that you can at least use as a starting point. However, in order to properly match your branding you will usually need to have a custom skin produced. This need not be expensive.
- Security - assuming professional hosting your information will be safe. There are many ways to control access to individual parts of a forum. Good discipline on passwords is important unless you are using some more powerful method of authentication. A number of products have plugin authenticaion options.
- Integration - this could be a deciding factor as many of these products suffer from a lack of integration options. This means that you could need to replicate information about contacts and groups that are already held in other systems, creating a maintenance problem. In a project we are currently doing for a leading trade association we needed a single database to determine access control to their members’ website and associated forums. To minimise developmant and maintenance costs we chose a forum with a separable authentication system.
So. We haven’t gone as far as to recommend a specific tool because the best choice will depend on your existing installation. Hopefully the above will at least help you to make an appropriate choice. Should you need any help with that please let us know.
