Similar to your description - I've been trying to emulate what others are already accustomed to having with Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Google Chat/Hangouts/Rooms, and Microsoft Teams. A general feed or stream for everyone and other rooms or groups or chats that have varying levels of privacy.

I have been looking around a bit toward the main community forum products such as Invision (formerly IPB). I think we can offer more or less the same functionality they do with a combination of ImpressCMS core, the profile module (with some tweaks, it's a bit old-fashioned and is stil mentioning ICQ and AOL accounts, go figure ), and iForum. 

The major functionality that we are still missing is the login options : Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft. I believe Oauth2 login could cover the majority of those. But that's a touchy area, as it is very security-sensitive.

iForum will need to be refactored in a major way to get rid of all the duplication with the core and potentially other modules. There is no escaping that sadly

In this stage, I will try for an easy integration and a nice and clean way to get a turnkey solution available for a forum on ImpressCMS. That includes a theme as well.

Suggestions and help are of course always welcome.  

Hi, 

iForum is long overdue for some technical overhaul, and while doing so, I would like to remove functionality that is not widely used, or not considered really necessary. If it appears that that functionality is useful after all, it can be added later. I'm thinking about the digest functionality, which I've never used until now for example.

What does your perfect forum look like? Please be as specific as possible, 'it works smoothly' is very dependent from your point of  view, and almost certainly will differ from what I consider smooth or easy to use