I have developed my own forum software for Domino for some time, because I was always shocked with the basic lacks of functionality of conventional forum softwares like phpBB, vnboards, Invision Power Boards, SMF, etc.... For them it seems normal that all messages are lost when the forum software is updated, and they just eat it with a bitter taste in their mouth. They also take happily backups every day, but most of the backups fail because of some misconfigured ftp accounts.

For someone who has worked with Domino that is absolutely not acceptable, since in Domino the database design and data is completely isolated from eachother, so no data is lost ever. And a backup is a backup in Domino, it's a file, and not some SQL mess which only simulates the actual data.

So far I have used my Domino forum template in 3 different forums:

http://www.toiveet.fi

http://www.fortran2008.com/forum

http://www.wishforum.com

And with this latest one, I have started to make it like a SharePoint template, so you can easily just make a new site and it works, everything is parametrized in a simple Parameters view.

IBM is also developing something similar, but I doubt they can make it as fast as I can

When it's completely ready, I will also upload a public free version to OpenNTF, since that's the nexus for standard Domino templates, and supported by IBM too.

All people who have seen the forums have thought it's not a real forum. I think it's because they are used to lots of spam and unneeded features, and they can't imagine that you can make things also elegant, kinda like google.com or an Apple device.

So far the forum template has the following features:

1) Posting as Anonymous user (can be disabled if wanted)

2) Posting as Anonymous user, but impersonating someone else (can be also disabled)

3) Logging in without registering (the forum registers you automatically and instantly (a secret Domino feature )

4) Uploading files to any post or into your forum profile document (also short links work).

5) Streaming OGG files directly (needs a little Domino httpd.conf hack)

6) Dynamically scaling to any screen resolution

7) List of latest modified topics (not a spam list of each post)

8) List of deleted posts

9) Undelete button

10) CSS 3.0 oriented visual layout

11) Single file database design (allows easy backups and offline working)

12) Fully parametrizable via a simple Parameters view

13) Support for root URL and sub URL forum home locations (for example: / or /forum)

14) Library area for structured sticky posts, including sublibraries

15) News area

16) Embedding of any HTML and JavaScript code (can be disabled)

17) CKEditor integration (can be disabled)

18) Fully modifiable design and code and using CSS and LotusScript

19) Free and paid support (including custom modification wishes)

Source