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Dear all, I just want to share some few links about tools which help improving online collective conversations with the aim of fostering collective intelligence.
Develped inside FP7 european framework's Catalyst project, there are some cool tools.

ASSEMBL, LITEMAP, DEBATEHUB, EDGESENSE

I hit a point tonight where I decided I really need to get my website to Drupal 7 and that has pushed up working on changing AF over to using a pluggable back end / entities way sooner than I had planned. I decided to start this discussion to get some thoughts out there and also so people are aware of what I'm working on since the code won't be on d.o any time soon.

There's some early thoughts here, though that's dealing with the forums themselves being entities: http://drupal.org/node/755438

When trying to import external forums into Drupal, I've found the main difficulty is a single fundamental difference between Drupal forums and the rest of today's forums.

It's the same one difference that for example makes common administrative tasks such as splitting or merging threads (while keeping chronological order), etc., easy in well-known forum systems but so difficult in Drupal forums, core and Advanced; difficult with Comment Mover, and even directly editing the database. Drupal forums are good and usable in most cases, with most normal functions similar to other systems but, for more advanced moderation, they are not yet ready.

Why? What's that basic difference? We can see it in the support forums of the currently most popular forum systems, such as vBulletin, phpBB, SMF, and Invision Power. Or we can install them and look at the tables where posts and threads are stored.

Drupal have modules for threaded and flat forums, so this is not the main difference. Most current forums are linear/flat by default, but part of them admit both linear and threaded display modes.

The basic difference is another one, truly simple but with fundamental effects:

Note: This list is no longer being updated as the to do list is soley in the issue queue.

Last update: March 13, 2008

KNOWN ISSUES
5/6 Last post doesn't recognize shadow posts (core forum issue)
5/6 Bleed-thru from theme makes unthemed forums look funny
6 _is_forum needs to take into account node types other than forum.
6 Mark all read needs to work on node types other than forum.
6 Mark all read needs menu code implemented
6 Make caching work on last post fetching

DOCUMENTING