Thread:Project:Support desk/Decent forum extensions?/reply

WikiForum is the closest to "forum" and "maintained", I'd wager (disclaimer: I've developed (significant portions of) WikiForum). LiquidThreads is what's being used here, but it has its shortcomings, too. MWBB is ancient and you really want to stay away from it. AWCforum has a strange, restrictive license plus the code wasn't that great.

My suggestion? Either start developing WikiForum further, or (get someone to) work on integrating a real forum (such as phpBB) with MediaWiki. Years ago Wikia released their customizations to phpBB as free and open source software; if you could find someone to turn those hacks to phpBB's core into a real phpBB plugin, that'd be great! After all, there's very little point in reinventing the wheel (forum software), when it's already been invented many times before. Unfortunately most (FOSS) forums don't really integrate with MediaWiki (for example, try finding a plugin/extension that allows a phpBB instance to use MediaWiki's user table as the "master", instead of phpBB's...) and even if there's some kind of a thing to handle logins, there usually isn't support for MediaWiki's wikitext, and that's considered essential by most people. Hence why not-so-ideal solutions like WikiForum & co. have been developed.

Free and open source software by nature is collaborative, which is why I'd want to encourage people to work on enhancing the existing tools instead of trying to fork or reinvent them.