Add forum

[alanfgh]

See wall discussion: http://www.tatoeba.org/eng/wall/show_message/19985#message_19985

Note that issue #93 is a request to redisplay comments from an earlier version of Tatoeba in which there was a forum.

[alanfgh]

A relevant part of that discussion, from Trang:

Anyway, it's been a while that I've been thinking about how transition the Wall into something more forum-ish, because I don't think it's appropriate anymore either.
It's not too difficult, it's more or less a matter of adding a column "category" in the "wall" table, and reviewing how things are displayed. But someone needs to take the time to work on it.

But even before thinking about categories, personally, the first step I'd want to work on is to "collapse" all these threads and give the possibility to have a title for each thread (there's actually a column "title" in the "wall" table).

If you're interested to work on this subject, let me know. We can probably find a weekend to discuss about it and code it :)

[jiru]

It's not too difficult, it's more or less a matter of adding a column "category" in the "wall" table, and reviewing how things are displayed.

@trang When you develop software, everything looks “not too difficult” until you actually start doing it, and realize it’s actually difficult and takes two, three or ten times more. I think it would be way more appropriate to use a forum plugin (if we can either find one than is compatible with CakePHP 1.2, or upgrade our CakePHP). Or install an external forum app with SSO. Because sooner or later, we are gonna need not only categories, but also mail notifications, post pinning, moderation, etc. and we’re going to keep an ever half-completed half-buggy implementation just like the wiki. Let’s just don’t make this mistake once more. We don’t have the time nor the capacity to implement a decent forum.

[loolmeh]

Because sooner or later, we are gonna need not only categories, but also mail notifications, post pinning, moderation, etc. and we’re going to keep an ever half-completed half-buggy implementation just like the wiki.

I think you need to think carefully about the available options, because you might as well be adopting an existing wiki that's complex, buggy, has too much features that we don't need, and is much harder to adapt into the existing codebase, in which case you won't be gaining much really just sinking as much time or even more trying to make it work for us, with the added complexity of a completely unfamiliar codebase injected in.

[ckjpn]

It might be worth looking into this again since we're now running a newer version of CakePHP.

There seem to be ways to do this.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cakephp+forum+plugin

[SeaLiteral]

When you develop software, everything looks “not too difficult” until you actually start doing it, and realize it’s actually difficult and takes two, three or ten times more.

This problem doesn't even look easy. What if a thread fits in several categories? Do replies have categories? Who can change which category a thread belongs to? Who can create (and delete? And merge?) categories? Should each category just have a name or should it also have a sentence or paragraph explaining what it's meant to be used for? If we let some users create new categories, how do we manage translations of category names (and maybe descriptions)? How does searching for threads/replies work?

And the worst part? Existing forum software doesn't solve the problems perfectly either. For example, I have yet to see a searchbar that handles Esperanto's iksa sistemo correctly,showing the same results for "ŝafo" and "sxafo" but different ones for "safo". But I guess a slightly unreliable search feature is still a lot better than no search feature.