[Mailman-Users] Integrating with a forum

[Ed Pastore]

Hi, folks.

I admin a list for a community which wants to expand our list to a  
forum. Some of us really like list communication; others would prefer  
a forum. Instead of forcing the issue, we want to do both, with  
bidirectional mirroring.

I know this issue has been raised before, and I know it's tricky. I'm  
not a programmer, but we have a programmer on hand who is willing to  
do the integration. All I need to do is scope the requirements  
properly. Here is my initial requirements definition, which is all  
very tentative:
http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Forum_integration

In there, you can see that I did find M2F, which appears to be a list<- 
 >forum integrator. Great. But it only works with phpBB 2. Not only is  
phpBB2 out of date, but also from past experience I find phpBB to be  
pretty underwhelming. So I'd like to use a more sophisticated (but  
still FOSS) forum such as MyBB (or others if you can suggest one that  
is up to the task). There is an alpha of M2F that claims to it  
eventually will do the trick, but it is indeed very alpha.

I'm posting here to see if anyone has any better insights than I have  
had so far and/or any comments on my existing document linked above.

Apart from the technical difficulties, the additional problem I see is  
with message overload. So I'm thinking of setting a second list. The  
existing one would be a full bidirectional mirror of the forum, and a  
new one would just be an announce list of any new topics posted to  
either (ie, anything that is a new topic on the forum or a new thread  
on the list). Or can I do that with umbrella lists somehow?

Am I dreaming. Is this just way too complicated to tackle?

I further want the forum to support OpenID. I imagine that adds  
additional layers of complexity when combined with list integration.

Any thoughts on any of this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Ed Pastore
http://metagovernment.org/wiki/User:Ed_Pastore