Forum software that lets you start topics based on articles?

Such as on a news website.

[HughMungus]

I have a general-interest site where I post news articles. I currently have a comment system but since I want to add a message board anyway, I was if it's possible to have links next to my news article links that would allow a visitor to go to the message board and automatically start a message board topic titled for that news article (or, take them to that discussion if it already exists).

TIA

[eggy ricardo]

You could always have a forum section to post all your news items in and then the replying to that message would be a form of commenting. Then all you would need is a fairly simple way of pulling the news items out and putting them on your front page or whatever in the format you need them. I've seen a few of these around or you could write your own.

Hope this helps
Cheers
Richard

[HughMungus]

I appreciate the suggestion. The problem with that is that the site is basically composed of the said news article links, so, I wouldn't want to make such a drastic change.

I wonder how hard it would be to use PHPBB or something that already exists and just set up a script that starts a new thread when the visitor clicks and goes to an existing thread when it doesn't already exist. Knowing what I know now, I can't imagine that that would be difficult.

[eggy ricardo]

Yeah thats a fair enough point. I would have thought that it would be fairly simple to do, as I have created such a thing for my own basic custom forum for making forum topics linked with an events calendar. I have not seen such a modification for phpbb or any other forum available for download but, as I say, it wouldn't take much I wouldn't have thought.

As to how you would go about it i can see two ways:
1) Add a News ID field to the topics table and use that to reference to the news posts table or whatever you use.
2) Make some sort of reference in the topic title but this could be problematic as you would have to stop people editing the title if they edited their post and so on.

I'm sure theres a few other solutions out there but number 1 i am sure would be feasable.

EDIT: to add to what i put previously, option 3 would be to have a Topic ID field in your news table and reference it that way. Not sure which would be easier without looking at the specific example.

Hope this helps
Cheers
Richard