Question for the hive-mind: Good cloud-based forums

[yendi]

I posed this on Twitter, but it's worth hitting an audience of mostly non-education folks, too, since the tools aren't specific to education, and there are a lot of Web 2.0-savvy folks on my FL:

For a project a faculty member is working on, we're trying to find a web-hosted forum (as in, a webapp, not paid hosting of PHPBB or somesuch) that allows for threaded discussions. Our campus LMS is out because we authenticate with a single-sign-on system, and creating sponsored accounts for the large number of non-locals who will need to participate isn't viable.

That said, it does have to be secure, for at least the value of secure that includes "password required to get in." Otherwise, threaded discussions are the big need, with the ability to embed or (better yet) upload streaming video a nice one, too. Technically, all we really want is a forum, but given the lack of forum-only tools, we're also looking at online courseware.

Given the eight zillion photo, finance, chat, gaming, and other social startups, I'd have figured that there'd be lots of forum choices, but there don't seem to be many.

Things on my plate to look at tomorrow (when I finally have free time): grou.ps, edmodo, nicenet, voicethread (using it mostly off-label to focus on text), a few others. Initial evals tend to suggest most places thread discussions one level deep, which is not completely useless, but borders on it. Anyone know any other good tools worth looking at?

Comments

[storme]

My workplace has been trying out http://braintrust.io/ for our forum needs - I don't know about embedded or uploaded video, but they were incredibly helpful when I had queries and requests for features we wanted.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Stupid suggestion: Livejournal community + restricted membership + friendslocked posts?

[celtic_maenad]

http://www.yuku.com/ ?

[phenom-woman.livejournal.com]

This is what we use for a national competition. There is email, social networking, video capabilities and more.

http://www.ning.com/chooseplan?source=CSTEM-BREAK

[ex-gnomicut.livejournal.com]

and know not many people use it for this, but the basic dreamwidth code base is really easy to install and configure. It has accounts/passwords, threaded conversations and... well, you know everything it has.

What it DOESN'T have is LDAP authentication. Although if it looked like there were an actual user desire for LDAP authentication instead of local accounts, I might look into it.(I can't see on a quick glance if there are any LDAP-to-openID gateways, which would solve the problem.)