[jdev] Proposal : Community site

[Bart van Bragt]

maqi at jabberstudio.org wrote:
> A nice thing would
> certainly be something like a Jabber-powered forum which integrates
> chatrooms and a WWW-based forum, also emphasizing Jabber's strengths and
> flexibility this way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software
> around that implements this.

Can't resist to jump on this nice soapbox :D

Very true, I'm one of the developers of www.phpbb.com and I would _love_ 
to create some kind of symbiosis between Jabber and a bulletin board. 
The problem is that this is currently close to impossible. Well, it's 
doable but only if you're running your own server/component or if you 
run a bot on some server, preferably the same server that your board is 
running on. The problem here is that 99% of the phpBB admins out there 
are not allowed to run bots, let alone setup a Jabber server on the 
machine that their forum is hosted on. So before we can do anything 
useful with Jabber (that we can incorporate into the distribution) there 
needs to be _much_ better/closer web integration. I really think that 
this can give Jabber a nice boost, Google currently find 3M+ sites with 
'powered by phpbb', even if those boards on average only have 10 users 
this gives you quite an audience. If they see Jabber buttons and cool 
extra features that they can use _if_ they have a Jabber account this 
can really help in spurring Jabber adoption. But before that can (not 
only in phpBB ofcourse, also on other websites/webapps) there need to be 
ways to facilitate easy communication between the HTTP and Jabber worlds 
that are scalable and a breeze to setup.

*jumps off soapbox again*

Bart