[hallenrm]

I am indeed impressed by hypography. I was wondering if one could start a similar portal for science teachers in India, where teachers could post their problems, ideas, innovations in their language (remember there are more then ten different languages spoken in India)

Any ideas how one could find the software, assuming one can raise some financial support.

[Tormod]

For software, some of my admins pointed me to Simple Machines, which is a free, open source forum software:

http://www.simplemachines.org

As for funding maybe you could apply for a grant from a teacher council or something?

[alexander]

you could use phpbb for that too...

[Bio-Hazard]

The best thing to do is look into free software and open-source technology. Linux would be your best bet if you wish to have security.

Some people buy forum code for their own operation; Other people will simply learn to code their own forum.

I believe for a person to have a nice forum it would be necessary to understand the coding language of that forum.

[alexander]

read on what Ubuntu is doing in Africa and Asia...
http://english.ohmynews.com/articlev...74318&rel_no=1

[hallenrm]

Thanks Alexander, Biohazard and Tormod.

I have indeed explored all your suggestions, but the real problem is that these software invariably require the forum members to type in their contributions. The community I want to target at, speaks and writes different languages other then English and they find it difficult to type in through QWERTY keyboards.

Can any one tell me about a community forum software, that allows its members to record their spoken messages.

[alexander]

whoah, shooting a bit too high, first think it through for a second, lets see how to put this, ok, lets say you record a speech, say its on average one minute long, and say that you encode it into mp3 format before you send it off to your server, so say all that will take about 512K, not much, ok, now your message gets stored in a folder with a relational database which knows who and when they said that, ok, first of all, in order to listen to 20 messages you would need to download 10 megs of music, and i dunno just how many people in india have DSL-like connections at their homes, secondly, this forum has over 70000 posts if i am not mistaken, divide that by 2, 45000, or about 45 gigs is the amount of storage space plus images, plus the database..... oh and not to forget the bandwidth that we are talking about here of people constantly downloading megs of sound files to see what others have answered, ok, and now to the coolest part of it all, and that is client software that someone would have to write to record and encode the message before submitting it to the forum.... no really, you are not the first person to think about this, just that, and i may be mistaken, but i dont think that you would be able to find such software as of today...

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by hallenrm

I have indeed explored all your suggestions, but the real problem is that these software invariably require the forum members to type in their contributions. The community I want to target at, speaks and writes different languages other then English and they find it difficult to type in through QWERTY keyboards.

vBulletin is used by many people who do not use QWERTY - Hebrew, Japanese and Arabic are examples. It is not free but I think they have academic prices.

Like Alexander says, spoken word forums is probably not the way to go. It would take forever to listen to a thread - plus you'd never get ranked in any search engines.

Since we're talking spoken word only, 32kbps would suffice so each post wouldn't be extremely huge but there's little you can do about the time it takes to play back a post.

But would your users really find it easier to *record* their voice than type? I doubt that very much. And how would people quote each other etc? Also, audio recording gives users no way to quickly browse a topic to see if it is interesting.

I do not recommend the recording route. For language examples it is perfect but for general forum posting it is probably not a wise choice.

[hallenrm]

Thanks a lot!

I think I have to innovate to find viable alternatives.