What would be the best way to use q2a as a forum?

Question

Can q2a be used as a forum? Q2A shows a list of all posts from all categories in question list, unanswered but in my case I was trying to use it as a forum rather than a quesstion answer site. Is it really possible to use it as forum?

Answer 1

It's definitely possible. You can order "answers" by date, disable comments and voting, then update the theme and language files so it looks like a forum. You can use categories for separate "boards" if you like.

I've looked into this myself, and at one point was planning on releasing a Q2A fork that works like a forum.

However, you will run into a performance problem if any thread has more than around 100 replies, because Q2A fetches all answers from the database whenever you view a question, and processes them all whether they are displayed on the current page or not.

That's something I'm hoping to fix in Q2A at some point (because it improves Q2A's performance too when there are many answers) but it's not high priority right now.

Answer 2

Forum comes with its own benefits and q2a has its own. If you are looking for a forum then I would suggest to go with phpbb, simple machine forum or vbulletin etc...there are many.

You should also look into flarum.org, its new type of forum.