I noticed that the “Rails Recipes” forum for discussions on this excellent book is using Opinion, a ruby on rails based forum which has been developed with a new twist on forum software.

Opinion is a Ruby on Rails based Forum system that tries to approximate a “blog comment” system rather than imitating busy and noisy traditional forum solutions that already exist.

Personally, I think this is a great step in a fresh, new direction. Traditional forums should be following a more social approach these days.

Features

• User management system
• Web services for users from external applications to remote login
• Gravatar Support
• Ajax for posting and administration
• Ability to flag posts (sticky, important, closed)
• Textile filter for messages with on demand help and preview function
• Different Userlevel support (Normal Users, Moderators, Administrators, Super User)
• Administration Toolbar for easy and fast topic management
• Password request and cookies
• RSS Feeds for each category and for each topic
• Search engine

Upcoming

• “Inspired by” system to link comments to certain other comments (creating a chain of thought) or Threading
• More administrative features
• Cosmetic changes (spinner, unread posts)
• Fixing Timezones
• Optional anonymous posts setting per Area

Sites using Opinion

• Shopify Forum
• Rails Recipes
• Sprout It