Having worked on Advanced forums for the last 5 years, ever since HSU first created it as a patch to core forums, I can say it would not be like the question engine upgrade in 2.1.

It is a patch to core that adds additional functionality. There would be no conversion process it would just be adding functionality to existing code. The only reason it is a separate module at the moment is because we were unsure how core wanted to proceed with forums and our clients demanded the extra functionality ASAP. So to be able to maintain it long term and allow clients to also use Moodle forums that would upgrade with Moodle core's decisions we made a separate activity.

We have kept Advanced forums up to date with all changes to Moodle core forums as well. It would be a drop in solution not a conversion or migration. In the code for Advanced forums you should be able to replace hsuforum with forum and slap it on top of forum and it will work.

Looks pretty nice. With advanced forums we coded it up such that multiple flag types could be added. it works much like how you have it only without the date overlay. The major miss is no display of those bookmarking types.

I think this spec would be a huge enhancement.

Are there any communications or alerts around the due dates? I am nto seeing how that fits in the system. It isn't part of my reading list.  It would be good if that date was part of my reading list and was sortable. It would also be good if the my reading list was expandable so that a user could read the post inline and remove it from the list. This would quickly allow them to resolve the reading list.

Other ideas would be a way to auto populate a reading list. So at the forum or discussion level set a auto add new posts to my reading list similar to subscriptions.

Moodlerooms Advanced forums can be used at http://demo2k12.moodlerooms.com/.

Organizations interested in Joule features and possible hosting can also request a 15 day trial of Joule as well. The 15 day trial will be their own site to play with where the above link is like demo.moodle.org and gets recreated every 12 hours. There are also several videos on Youtube just search for advanced forums.

Both of these options provide a demo of all of the features we are suggesting be part of Moodle core, activity grading interface, advanced forums, alerts and streams, and outcomes (as of July 13th when we release it to our clients).

Because advanced forums is a separate forum type we have never recreated the forum search functionality or the display posts in the user's profile. This would all come by moving Advanced forums back to a core forum. As I said the migration would be as simple as search and replace hsuforum with forum in the code.

Nothing currently exists in Advanced forums for user notes beyond adding the notes block to a forum. https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-39707 lists all the features that have been added beyond core forums with the exception of manual grading through the activity grader interface. Which as Martin stated is not included because AGI is not in core.
As for the lose of the reply I agree that is the one feature that Forum NG has the I want to add to Advanced forum's nested view. It is my opinion that if you combine Forum NG's inline reply with Advanced forum's Nested view (AJAX load of forum and replies on demand) you would never use any other forum view unless you were visually disabled.

One thing that both advanced forums and forum NG fail at is an accessible view of the forums. I have seen nothing from OU in this respect for forums, but I know we will be implementing this functionality by August in advanced forums. Again as per the ticket above the design will be based on http://blog.bargirangin.com/2013/03/a-model-for-accessible-lms-discussion.html. I still need to get a public specification for this, working towards this by the first week of June. Multiple display options to me is a huge advantage of advanced forums over forum NG. A user is allowed to pick a view of the forums that is most productive for them.

I'm thinking about writing a new forum plugin to be honest, which would implement most of these requested features, to make it much more like proper forum software like invision boards, phpbb, etc... as there is so much more that could be done with these forums. 

Hi Derek,

Apologies for the delay in my reply. I've had a very busy few months and some of my forum subscriptions have fallen behind.

Regarding your first question, I was really hoping to get some Forum changes in for Moodle 3.0. I have been actively working on User Disguises (formerly Anonymous Forum - MDL-1071). This is a work-in-progress and I have a working prototype with basic functionality already. I hope to be able to set aside a week at some point to try and finish my prototype and get some initial feedback.

Regarding your specific items:

1) Sticky posts

Sticky posts are an interesting one. There have been a number of patches along the way, and the latest from Charles looks pretty good. He has already identified an integration blocker regarding it. The main blocker though is that Sticky Posts do not have a pedagogical purpose.

The Moodle Forum is intended to be a single-use forum. You use it to discuss a single topic, and any essential information which would be found in a Sticky Post should be in the forum description. This is a view that Martin has put forward at various points, and has re-iterated in discussion about this feature.

Personally, I can see a place for this kind of functionality, but I think that it is also highly dependent upon the ability to freeze discussions in real-usage. The pedagogical use to me is that individual discussions can be pinned as important for those students coming back to view the content again later.

2) Renderables / Renderers / Templates

I've attempted to work on this numerous times too. Jetha has recently done so, but he has now moved on to greener pastures over in Japan. Again, this is one of the features I am really keen to work on and to finish. I deliberately held off on doing this work until the new template system arrived, which it did in Moodle 2.9. Now it is here, I simply haven't had any time to pick this up again. I started looking at it again 2 weeks ago.

Personally I see this as the biggest blocker to all forum changes and this has my highest priority.

3) Reports for forum

I'm really hoping that someone can define more of what they want here. With the new logging systems, we should be able to do more. I would love to close this (it's the oldest open Moodle issue), but other items are higher on my personal list. A decent specification for this item would bump it up the chain significantly.

4) Accessibility

This is very related to item 2. It's also one that is high on our radars. I have tried to address this before at the same time as 2, but I think this made things too complicated and ultimately led to the problems that I was having. I think that this needs to be completed once we have 2 in place, but hopefully straight after.

5) Edit inline

Again, very dependent upon the templates, but also on our forms library in general.

To my mind, 2 is the most important because it also enables a host of other things:

1. ability for designers to change the DOM structure
2. improved accessibility (4)
3. allows templating of forum e-mails too
4. easier to add new features like sticky posts (1), and user disguises

I'm sorry that we haven't made as much progress on the forum as we would like. I am actively trying to improve the forum. The forum is an incredibly complicated module, largely because it supports so many use-cases and has so many diverse and inter-connected features (multiple groups + grouping modes, multiple distinct types of forum with different features and functionality, email out, subscriptions to both discussion + whole module, digests, post read tracking, rss, etc.). This complexity is often forgotten, and I suspect that when I look at the code for the sticky discussions, this will be the case there too - it simply doesn't make sense to pin posts in a blog forum for example.

Hope that helps explain the state of play,

Andrew