General forum discussion

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:

I want that whenever user post for Jobs it will also add in forum for discussion.

Any help is appreciated.

I see discussions about removing threading from comments, and I'd like to make a plea for keeping this feature.

Dear All,

I know that I will most likely be wrong about this, but with the advancement of CCK, Views, OG and Panels, is the forum module really necessary anymore? My idea being is that with all these "practically core" modules, isn't it feasible to create a forum with just these modules?

I can create a content type called "forum post" manually, set the taxonomy for the forums (granted containers would be an issue) and use views to custom tailor the data shown to the users. I can already create 8/10th's of the forum functionality with just that scenario. Unless I am missing something.

Howdy all,

I'm considering writing an analysis on a few forum systems, with the aim of identifying what features "make a difference" when using the environment. Not so much as a feature list, but more a conceptual list. I intend this to be focused towards a document that can be reviewed by all and sundry when it comes to establishing the technologies we use to build core/modules.

Or something like that ;)