My Own Pirate Radio

I’m planning to set up an invite-only online forum for collecting feedback from a group of people using a private software beta. I pinged folks on TorCamp what their favorite private forum tools are — see their very helpful responses here — and then did some further evaluation on my own. I looked at Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, Ning, Basecamp, CollectiveX, PbWiki, and Mercury Grove.

This ended up being a lot of writing, so I’m breaking it into two parts.This first post summarizes my requirements and conclusions so far. The second post, which I’ll publish on Monday, gives details on the services I evaluated.

The Requirements

Must-Have features:

• online access via web browser
• secure: invite-only, users must login, admin controls access
• threaded discussion with an archive and search
• simple… clean and usable UI, easy to use for anyone web-savvy, easy to set up and manage
• email integration, e.g. message digests, post-from-email
• data export, so that I can switch to another provider if I want to
• good value. free is nice, but not necessary.

Nice-to-Have features:

• wiki or some place to put static (non-discussion) content
• ability to upload/attach documents such as JPGs
• sub-groups, e.g. to have a group focused on a particular topic (versus creating an entirely new, parallel group)

Don’t-want or don’t-really-care-about features:

• calendar and project-management goo
• social networking between members
• member profiles
• custom domain name
• features for promoting my forum (since it’s private)

Bottom line: Google Groups seems to fit the bill

Based on the services I evaluated, Google Groups seems to best fit the requirements. It has all the features I need:

* threaded discussion forum with excellent email integration
* private groups (also supports public and "announcement-only" groups)
* simple social networking features, opt-in
* look and feel: simple, clean UI; small themes gallery
* create basic web pages for posting static (non-discussion) content
* file attachments, up to a total of 100 MB

Better yet — in what turned out to be the real differentiating factor — Google Groups has none of the features I don’t want. For instance, it doesn’t push my group members to network with each other if they don’t want to, it doesn’t nag them to fill in user profiles, and it doesn’t force them (or me!) to answer unnecessary registration questions. It also gives users sufficient control over how frequently to be notified of updates. And while Google Groups does have ads, they’re off to one side of the page, rather than inline within the group content (ahem… unlike Yahoo!).  Lastly, the price is nice: free.

Part two: In the second part of this post I’ll write about the other alternatives and why they didn’t fit the bill.