what are some forums for elgg?

My apology in advance if this is in the wrong place, I'm new to community site and find the groups a little bit confusing. I go to groups and see different discussions but then need to go to a different Discussion tab to see what's new? 

I anyway am looking for a plugin that would act like a "normal" forum, the groups are very confusing in how they work so far. I'm sure they will start to make more sense once I use them but I don't know if anyone signing into a site is going to understand this.

What are some normal forum type plugins? Thank you for any help, I do find some discussions but they are again a little confusing and dated from years ago, what works with current 1.8 elgg please.

  • i agree that the discussion/group and blog system is confusing and not very friendly. i have always thought this.

    i looked at the 'normal' forum integrations when i started with elgg and did not find one that was fully integrated into elgg.. so i chose to customise the elgg code instead (which ultimately helps the whole elgg system more than getting 3rd party apps involved).

    that said, i am only now beginning to look at this issue again on my site. one path is to install 'group_tools' plugin and disable the 'latest discussions' view/tab. this results in just having the list of groups. you can also use 'menu_builder' to build a custom menu and remove the 'discussion' option from the main menu. so you now just have 'groups' (or whatever you prefer). then visitors will simply see the list of groups (which is akin to 'forums' in standard forum apps) and from there they can choose one and will see discussions and whatever other types of content you have added to the groups. 'widget_manager' is another helpful plugin for groups.

  • Agreed it is confusing. On the community site groups have to serve as top level categories, but since groups do a bunch of other things, the UX is bad. I.e. once in the group profile you must dig for the active topics, and you must first join each group to post. Groups are much better for modeling teams within an office/org. The only advantage is that your notification settings can differ between groups.

    A simple improvement would be to have a global page that listed the groups, but the items pointed directly to the group discussion pages instead of the group profiles. And to eliminate the silly requirement to join the group before posting.

  • the site-wide categories is another aspect to this. i was already partway through writing a detailed view of these issues.. i will add it soon to the feedback/planning group.

     

  • Or add a link to 'start' a topic in the top of the groups page?

    Rodolfo Hernandez

    Arvixe/Elgg Community Liaison