Private Online Forum Tools – Part 2

This is the second in a two-part post on software tools for hosting private online forums. Part 1 is here.

Alternatives to Google Groups and why I didn’t pick ‘em

In descending order of preference:

• Ning: Too strongly focused on member-to-member networking and marketing/promotion. Looks great for building a custom social network, though, if you don’t mind someone else owning your member list.
• Basecamp: Nice tool for project management, not so great for discussion. I’d use this to manage a simple project.
• PbWiki: good wiki with notifications, but no discussion support. I’d use this to get a group of people to collectively build a knowledge base. (In fact, I started to once, but got too busy with other stuff.)
• Yahoo! Groups: I took a very brief refresher look. Still too commercial and self-promotional for my taste. Inline self-promotional ads… yuck.
• Mercury Grove: the combination of project management and blog-like features struck me as odd. I prefer Basecamp for project management.
• CollectiveX: I balked at the overly grabby registration page. Gender? Birthdate? Sheesh. Read about Permission Marketing.

Details follow.

Basecamp Summary

I’ve used Basecamp before to do project management. It’s clean and simple. As an aside, I’ve always been impressed by their pricing and signup page… if you’re ever thinking about how to do an easy-to-understand pricing model, check out their pricing page.

Notable features:
* UI is very clean and simple
* To do lists
* Messages + comments + per-message subscriptions for email notification
* File sharing
* Milestones / calendar
* Permissions per user, per project
* Data export as XML file
* Developer API
* Pricing: there is a free 1-project plan; other plans give you more projects, more security, and more storage, starting at $12/month and maxing out at $150/month

Mercury Grove Summary

This is another project management tool, much like Basecamp. Calendars, tasks, lists, projects, contacts, tasks. In fact, aside from the blog-style discussion forum and blog feed integration, I find it hard to tell the difference. After this post I learned more about the product from Scott Annan, Mercury Grove’s CEO. You can read about that here.

Notable features:
* Look and feel: small set of themes. rather bland design. no ads, though, which is nice.
* Blog-like discussion board with 2-way comments + options to notify all members or just the poster via email
* Integrate feeds from external blogs to your group
* Drag and drop calendar and task lists
* Email notifications and alerts – but I don’t see a way to control frequency of notification
* Storage: 50 MB free
* Pricing: community groups are free, small/medium biz is $100/month, enterprise is $450/month

Ning Summary

Ning lets you build your own custom social network, and then helps you grow it by inviting friends, distributing promotional badges, monitoring visitor stats, and so on. Ning provides many of the key features you expect to find in social networks like Facebook as a white-label service. I find the UI design particularly slick… it’s highly interactive (done with dojo); you can create a very professional looking site in just a few minutes, and turn big chunks of features (forums, blogs, groups) on and off easily. I’m quite impressed by the breadth of functionality Ning offers.

Notables:
* Look and feel: drag and drop web site designer plus a gallery of customizable themes
* Discussion forum: posts, replies, optional topic categories, automatically follow discussions you reply to
* Send broadcast messages to all network members
* Blogs, which can be private if you are posting in a private network
* Groups
* Photo and Video widgets
* Customizable profile questions you can ask of members when they join the network
* Storage: 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth per month, free. upgrade units of storage+bandwidth for $9.95 per month.
* Pricing: free ning networks are funded by google ads. upgrade to ditch the ads and promotional widgets and get more storage.

PbWiki Summary

PbWiki lets you create a simple, secure wiki, and invite people to contribute. The baseline offering is free. As with other wiki softwares, PbWiki is geared at building up a repository of shared knowledge, rather than enabling the "live discussion forum" paradigm that I’m looking for. That said, you could certainly set up a wiki page for each discussion topic, and sign up to receive notifications of wiki page edits via email.

Notable features:
* Notifications: you can receive email for wiki updates, and/or subscribe via RSS. You can control the frequency of email notifications through the account settings page, but I don’t see a way to selectively subscribe to updates for particular pages.
* Storage: all wikis come with 10 MB of storage that is backed up automatically. Ugprade to get more.
* Attachments are supported
* Export: wiki page contents can be exported as a zip
* Look and feel: there are templates and skins for customizing the wiki look and feel
* Security: wikis may be private or public.
* Security: free wikis have a simple access control model: each person gets full read/write access, or none. 
* Security: upgrade to get more granular control over admins, moderators, contributors
* API: there is a developer API available
* Custom domain name
* Pricing: non-premium wikis are free; premium wikis have per-seat charges, starting around $100 per user per year, with volume discounts