Edit & Update: This is an update in both title and text to my previous forum posting., but since suggestions for forum and group page changes have been appearing lately I decided to expand my original topic to allow others to contribute suggestions. You do NOT have to reply to the original topic, but it doesn't hurt. I have been adding links to this posting when something related to it pops up,. but this might help consolidated those ideas more easily. I'll try to keep this topic bumped so every contributor has a chance to have their ideas seen and to compare and evaluate the ideas of others like it.
Original topic follows:
Today @stoot barfield posted a staff topic soliciting player input. The posts were coming so fast that @stoot's and other peoples responses were appearing far from where the original posting they were replying to appeared. People starting to read the thread were seeing a wall of often lengthy posts and they simply began to skip items to respond to what they had managed to read, sometimes duplicating previous statements by others. Since this thread was also to solicit the opinions of the players the ability to create a polled response would have been helpful in this instance. I tried to find some forum software that would allow what is called "multi-threading". Rather than each response being connected only to the original post the respondent may also connect their reply to another poster's statement instead, possibly even changing the topic title in that instance. Unable to find any suitable "off-the-shelf" software at this time, I'm starting the process of writing my own.
Current plans:
I plan to use the Bonfire framework which is a new extension of the more general CodeIgniter framework. It also supports HMVC functionality. I already have a working template file for this so I have a head start here (I was a first adopter). For the forum text editor I've selected the CK Editor. It's open source with a "copy left" license. It is also an AJAX editor with full JQuery support. For the general database functionality I'm using the CodeIgniter database extension DataMapper ORM v.1.8.1
I haven't selected any specific polling tool yet.
Suggestions? Criticisms? Volunteers? Need help with all the geek-speak?