Forum OpenACS Q&A: packages

Jeff Davis and Aristoi have done a lot of work recently on Forums.  We are working with Tracy and the .LRN consortium to roll it back in in a way that supports .LRN's stability, but it looks like that won't happen till after the release of 2.1.

In less then a week we will have public CVS of the code base for the Concord Consortium Project, you should be able to access the latest forum code from there.  We will also post demo account info so you can try it out.

If you need it ASAP send me an email and I'll email you a tar ball.

Highlights include:

Javascript threads that open and close.
Tracking of who has viewed what post.
Marking read/unread posts.
Ability to lock a thread.
htmlarea
WebEQ integration for entering formulas (WebEQ is a proprietary package so parameterizing using it is one of the todo's before this version of forum's is released.)

Some of those changes are interesting -- what I'm dealing with is the latest Google algorithm change that makes forums unspiderable.  Well, Googlebot will spider it, but strips off pieces of the url with a formula that seems to make little sense -- and certainly doesn't help traffic.

Most of the changes I need to make would probably be best served through a .vuh file and I would appreciate some guidance here.

Basically, there are many things that cause forum posts on OpenACS and many other Forum products to get indexed poorly.  What I'll do is summarize the changes I am proposing, grab the latest code from whomever, patch it, test it, and submit the diff if it is something that anyone else would find of value.

I'm guessing Adserver has been abandoned.

Roberto and I had some correspondence regarding Classified Ads and I've not heard back from anyone on FAQs.

Galileo has worked on FAQ (Gerardo, notifications), also Nima on categories ...
Adserver - classifieds nobody ...