tdang - 7:50 am on Sep 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hello all,

I've recently been charged with developing the intranet site for our
department. I don't really have any technical concerns as we are just
piggy-backing off of the much larger corporate intranet so I am really
just in charge of developing and maintaing the content.

Our users have asked for a forum to be developed as part of the
project. We presently have email distribution groups set up that are
used quite frequently, but since our Exchange accounts are limited to
70 megs each, most of the emails are deleted and there is no central
repository for the information for future reference. The idea of the
forum being that the threads could be archived and searched for future
reference.

Having been a user of forums for many years I am quite famaliar with
them as well as some of the problems that come hand in hand. However,
I've never developed or maintained one so I was hoping that you all
could give me some words of advice as to policies that I can reccomend
to management so that it doesn't get out of hand.

Some thoughts I've had so far:

1. Do we need a moderator? As these may sometimes be discussions of a
sensitive nature, it makes sense that the moderator should be chosen
carefully but would that person have enough time?

2. Should we mandate the moderator approve all messages? This seems
like a good way to filter inappropriate material, but very time
consuming.

3. Is there a better vehicle for our needs? Perhaps archiving the
email discussions onto the intranet somehow?

Thanks!