Need a site like AskMetaFilter. Any Suggestions?

April 15, 2008 11:33 PM

Does anyone know of a template that is similar to AskMetaFilter? I'm trying to set up a communications site for my company, and I think that this format would suit it perfectly. I'm not much of a programmer, but I really like the social format of this site and think that my company could benefit from a similar structure for our interior communications. Any suggestions?
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb to computers & internet (9 comments total)

The format is pretty similar to a blog, so I would start there.

metachat uses a hacked version of b2evolution.
Or you can use metaphilter.

Finally, consider using some forum software. is very popular, but there are a tonne of open source solutions out there if you look for them.
posted by seanyboy at 12:24 AM on April 16, 2008

And I may have misread the question. Oh well.
posted by seanyboy at 12:25 AM on April 16, 2008

I don't know if anyone besides monkeyfilter and my friends and I are still using the metaphilter, but it does work well. Every time I go in to edit the code I'm reminded how much I hate PHP and the spaghetti it engenders... so if you need to customize it a lot peek under the hood first. However, by almost never touching anything on the site it's worked rock-solid for coming up on 5 years.

Make sure you turn off the RSS pings/trackbacks feature (it's spambait), and if you go with a newer MySQL there might be an issue with the passwords(?) field definition? Don't recall, but I fixed it -- if you run into this let me know and I'll see what I touched.

Feel free to mefi mail me with q'ns.
posted by mrflip at 2:08 AM on April 16, 2008

What you're asking for could realistically be accomplished in WordPress by requiring members to be subscribed in order to leave comments and with some creative skinning. Nothing more complicated than a blog, this here MeFi.
posted by disillusioned at 4:12 AM on April 16, 2008

Using a wiki might be useful too.
posted by gjc at 7:30 AM on April 16, 2008

Metaphilter looks cool. Can anyone explain how I can download it? The site says something about needing a CVS client; is this going to be a HUGE hassle for someone who is no programmer? If it is, maybe I'll just do a Wordpress install.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 8:20 AM on April 16, 2008

Metaphilter is a clone of MetaFilter, but it's pretty old and unsupported. I would second the suggestion of simply downloading wordpress, requiring everyone to have a login, then doing a private site with logged in accounts using that.
posted by mathowie at 9:14 AM on April 16, 2008

This may be a long shot (and I'll totally understand if Meta-admin dont wish to share details) but would it be possible to get a more detailed explanation of exactly what powers Metafilter? I feel the same was as ISeemToBeAVerb, that this layout is stellar and might work really well for my companies intranet too. I know you probably dont want people stealing your design and ideas, but if the underlying infrastructure/software is open source, it'd be awesome to get a peek and see if there was a way to adapt it to my needs.
posted by jmnugent at 10:17 AM on April 16, 2008

I work with the team that makes Movable Type, and the "Community Solution" has features for exactly this kind of community which were directly influenced by Ask MeFi. There's support for creating such sites out of the box, or finding consultants to do it for you.
posted by anildash at 6:36 AM on April 19, 2008