Best turnkey private forum?

May 18, 2022 6:58 PM

I'll be facilitating a 12-week writing workshop, and I want to have a private place for participants to discuss work between classes. Ideally they would be able to upload documents and comment on them. The level of technical literacy is not terribly high; last time, some people had trouble uploading documents to Google docs and I had to do it for them. So whatever forum we use must be easy to use--the basic functionality at least.

I have bought a domain name for these periodic workshops (which I plan to continue having a couple of times a year) but haven't done much with it yet. I probably don't want to mess with trying to set forums up myself a la PHPbb, unless it is truly easy. I do not have time, energy, or mental or emotional room for frustration, I need something that works properly the first time.

There were a dozen participants in the last workshops, held over Zoom, and I'm guessing the count will be something like that again. We did have a Facebook group page, but not everyone is on FB and it doesn't seem to work well for more in-depth back and forth, nor offer the ability to upload documents.

I've been researching, and my head is swimming with possibilities. Instead of continuing to sort through a million options, I wanted to see if anyone on here had personal experience setting up a private forum for a similar reason and had recommendations for or against.

posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I've successfully used Basecamp in the past. It was pretty easy to use, but it probably has a lot of features that you won't really need.
posted by akk2014 at 7:04 PM on May 18, 2022

Not a Private Forum per se, but we set something up like this as a collaborative space using Microsoft Teams.
posted by Master Gunner at 7:20 PM on May 18, 2022

I was just in a writing class last year that used a slack for this purpose. Pretty easy and worked well!
posted by jdl at 8:31 PM on May 18, 2022

If your hosting provider has WordPress available, there are a number of forum plug-ins for WordPress that are simple to set up and should offer the functionality you need. I've used a couple of them, but don't remember the name, sorry. I think BuddyPress was one of them. I'm not sure about allowing upload of documents, though.
posted by dg at 11:26 PM on May 18, 2022

Slack is definitely the easiest to set up and use as long as the retention options are enough for you (or you plan to pay). Discourse is great forum software, relatively easy to set up, and they have a (expensive) turnkey hosted solution, but there are other companies that will host an instance.

Anti-recommendation for Basecamp. Besides being an awful company+leadership, I’ve found it to be very user unfriendly as a community forum.
posted by supercres at 12:18 AM on May 19, 2022

Slack is the easiest.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:40 AM on May 19, 2022

I took a remote poetry class recently that used Wet Ink for this.
posted by rabbitbookworm at 6:08 AM on May 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

When a group I am in used slack briefly, documents could be attached to messages, but I didn’t see a place to just upload a document and keep it there for reference (like a “Files” section) or commenting without having to go back to the message that it was attached to - that is, files were affiliated to comments, not comments affiliated to files. To me that doesn’t sound like the functionality that OP needs (no different than email threads, so they’d be better off letting their workshop participants just use their own email that they are already familiar with rather than a new thing). Is there a way to set slack up differently and the instance I was on was just not set up in that particular way? Or maybe you can always have separate files on slack, but the folks on the slack I used didn’t know how to do that? I didn’t see a way to do it on the instance we used, either, and I’m more technically literate than average (or than it sounds like OP’s workshop participants will be).

Other groups I am a part of use Google Drive, or Google Groups for this. No matter what option, probably having a video that demonstrates uploading (and other details in using the forum) would be helpful for workshop participants? Maybe you weren’t using the full Google Drive previously, and they can be annoying to log on to initially, but there is a prominent button to click (“New”, which has “Upload File” as one of the first options in its sub-menu; or “New Doc” and then they can copy and paste in from whatever other program they use) for uploading, so participants who are struggle with that will likely struggle with most any system you choose. In which case I would say choose whatever is reasonable for you and most participants, and just make sure there are tutorial videos available for reference.
posted by eviemath at 6:19 AM on May 19, 2022

All my writing groups and communities are on Discord these days. It’s excellent and can do video calling in small groups. Conversation can be organised into channels and specific discussions threaded. It’s not a traditional ‘post a topic, reply to the topic’ type forum, but it has fast search, lots of plugins and can be used on phones and tablets. Also you’re not hosting it, so there aren’t the concerns about being hacked or otherwise attacked you may have with a self-hosted PHP bulletin board or similar.
posted by Happy Dave at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2022