Evan,

Thanks for the tip about WestWind's forum. I hear nothing but good things about this company, and it's only a matter of time before I take a serious look at their products. Their forum is very slick, but neither that nor the Universal Thread appears to be targeted at selling itself as a general-purpose discussion system. Instead, each of these forums is devoted to its own specialized topic areas. That isn't to say that one couldn't imagine applying either of these systems to some other topic.

What if you wanted to create an entirely new public forum, say related to your own product, or on some topic of general interest? I have this crazy notion, for example, that every software product's help system or "knowledge base" would benefit from being smoothly and directly connected to a corresponding category in an open online discussion system. My sense of it, admittedly based on a very sketchy understanding, is that WestWind's stuff would be a suitable tool to build such a system, maybe even the best tool. Would you agree?

Meanwhile, I've got an interesting recursive chicken-and-egg problem here, because I'm not yet prepared to build such a system with these heavyweight tools, and I really want to discuss a bunch of related general issues before I try to do this the hard way. So I'm starting by looking at "easy" things, like FrontPage and Deja's free forums facility. The kinds of general issues I want to discuss are things like search features, how threads are presented, better ways of categorizing, integration with edited content and other forums, filtering, polling, reviewing, offline viewing, email notification, and a myriad of other sub-topics. I think there are enough such topics that warrant discussion without regard to a particular implementation that a broad, separate discussion is called for, untainted by any major bias toward a particular software package or service.

So let me again encourage you to join the Discussion Discussion, if only to cast your vote in the poll and offer some small comment to help get the discussion going. My apologies to those who had trouble because I failed to mention the need to register for a free My Deja account. That's beyond my control, but I think you'll find the latest free services from Deja are very nice indeed.

Mike


>>The Universal Thread has some nice features I haven't seen in other online discussion systems.
>
>As far as most usable forum.
>
>#1 Universal Thread
>#2 WestWind - www.west-wind.com
>
>Most others, Fox or not, leave me scratching my head as to who replied to whom and it is difficult to follow a thread.