Django Forum

I'm always banging on about how cool it would be to have Metaposts in web forums - some place which is easily accessible in each topic (but not at all prominent) where you can post about the topic ("There's no point discussing this and I'm going to keep posting this over and over if you keep discussing it" etc. - I'm sure you've seen thousands of these kinds of posts) rather than actually discussing whatever the topic's subject is.

Not only would it give people who want to moan about a topic (legitimately or otherwise) somewhere to vent their bilious fluids, thus helping to prevent the topic itself from going off-topic in that direction, it would also give moderators somewhere to move posts of that nature without resulting in those famous forum staples, OMG Mods Deletion Anger and "Where Did My Post Go" Posts In "Announcements And Feedback" type areas.

So I started a simple forum application (darcs repository) last week as a base for playing around with some ideas I haven't seen implemented in popular web forum software, such as Metaposts.

It's currently up to the stage where all the basic things you'd expect of a forum work, but not yet at the stage where you would want to use it on a public site - specifically, all moderation is currently performed using the django.contrib.admin application and there aren't any user permission checks in place yet to make sure you shouldn't be allowed to do stuff based on your account (whoops).

For now, it's still just my playground for new forum features - you can currently choose different types of post formatting using a setting (Markdown and BBCode are already implemented courtesy of python-markdown and postmarkup, respectively) and there's already a Metapost model, which will be integrated once I figure out a way to do so usefully.