I'm searching for a discussion platform with roughly these guidelines:
- Designed from the bottom up with in-depth, prose like discussion in mind
- instead of snippet-like commenting like on facebook/blogs/youtube/stackoverflow etc
- Basic user functionalities: private messages, user profiles
- Uploading images and attachments
- Formatting with Markdown or tags
- Embedding images and videos from youtube, vimeo etc.
- something like embed.ly support with rich previews would be best
- Simple to extend
- For example, SMF requires all updates to be made into packages, which are a pain to build and they tend to collide with other packages.
- Best would probably be if source code is clean enough for new features to be feasibly written
Overall, prefer simplicity instead of exceedingly many features. I've used SMF, phpBB and Telescope in the past. Telescope was interesting, but being a reddit clone it was built for commenting links instead of lengthier discussion. vBulletin seems like a beast that is too overkill and difficult to extend. I'm hoping to find something cutting edge yet robust enough to be used, like some lightweight node-based solution maybe.
