discussion tool for developers? [closed]

Question

Note: This is a crosspost from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14761241/discussion-tool-for-developers

Hi all,

I'm part of a group of developers who are spread around the country. As you can imagine, collaboration is a non-trivial exercise. Is there a tool that facilitates discussions? Here are my constraints:

• can't be hosted on our internal servers
• needs to support nested discussions (or at least fork off existing ones)
• must be able to restrict logins and permissions per discussion

What I've looked at:

• Discourse

  • Supports forking discussions, and doesn't need internal hosting, but can't have private discourses.

• Apache Wave

  • Supports nested discussions, can restrict logins, clunky UI (keeps asking to save a discussion and there's no save action on the page)

• Reddit

  • Can have private subreddits, don't need to host it, per se, but there's a stigma with a company hosting its discussions on there

Any other suggestions?

Thank you for your time :)

Answer 1

Have you looked at basecamp.com -- it was designed for this sort of thing.

If you've got some ability to host stuff, you could use redmine as it has discussion boards built in and definitely supports most of your requirements out of the box.

Another angle would be using your SCM provider if they have it -- both bitbucket and github have some collaboration features.