A friend at Boston Children’s Hospital wants to establish an online community for 400-1000 people who are either working at the hospital or are parents of children with a specific disorder. He basically wants a discussion forum, but with state-of-the-art features for moderation, spam-proofing, and karma-assignment. His main concern is quickly identifying people who are negative contributors and getting rid of them or changing their behavior. Is there a good free and open source software package that he can simply install and run? drupal.org perhaps?
7 thoughts on “Best packaged online community software?”
Comments are closed.
Definately Drupal. It has all the plugins you need and more. Plus it is LAMP (easy to install and support)
How about an article on how online communities have changed since 2000/2001, i.e. when you were actively working on the problem and what software might need to do differently these days?
Neal
The phrase you mentioned — “His main concern is quickly identifying people who are negative contributors and getting rid of them or changing their behavior” is actually not a technology problem, but rather about having a great site mom.
There is actually no built-in “karma” system, although there are a variety of voting and points options (userpoints).
phpBB *might* actually be a better choice if ALL he wants is a discussion forum. I’ll run this past the Drupal.org consulting list and see if anyone has time to write up some suggested configs.
I agree phpBB may be all he needs.
I had a look at Drupal myself a while back. I didn’t get to the message board parts, so I wouldn’t know about that. I basically dismissed it because its “CMS” is too much like a Blog, rather than what I was looking for. (which is creating articles under categories and carefully place them in the navigation)
That and the fact all themes looked pretty much the same gave me the impression that really making it your own isn’t quite as simple as it should be, which probably isn’t a problem for your friend’s website.
you should see if communispace (in watertown) will help you out – they’re expensive, but maybe they’d do some pro bono stuff for a good cause.
Tina: “expensive” is pretty far from the “free” that we were looking for. Children’s already has the infrastructure that they need, I think.
Neal: I’m not sure that online communities have changed since 2000. Certainly the discussion forum systems that I see don’t seem to be any better. Hardly anyone seems to have figured out the unified discussion forum design that we built on photo.net in 2000 (you can have multiple forums, but let people who want to see them all combined on one screen so that it is convenient to see what’s new).
Community Server 2007 is an excellent choice. While it’s not open source you get what you pay for and it’s inexpensive. MySpace just picked it up for it’s Forum and Blogging capabilities. Probably the most user friendly user interface out of the box.