Sounds more like a blog than a forum. Wouldn’t WordPress allow you to do this, with you posting the topic, then leaving comments open?
Do you have a WordPress installation already? I think it might do what you want, unless I missed something in reading your comment.
thanks for your quick reply.
using wordpress would work and that’s a good thought, but I would have to customize it quite a bit I think…?
I’m wondering if there’s an easy way to dumb down bbPress (or wordpress) so I can really just utilize its comments functionality — so I can have a page with a one thread based conversation and that’s it. (I’d like other users to be able to add their comments like they can on a wordpress blog entry…) Any recommendations on how to do this easily?
Is there other software that just focuses on this?
thanks very much.
Sounds like a guestbook to me.
I’m really just thinking of an extremely simple one-thread message board (where the users don’t ever get a choice to pick a thread, instead they just post to an ongoing line of comments). I want exactly what this thread is doing without the rest of the functionality, like creating new threads etc. I can tweak this software to do this — I don’t mean to make this over complicated, but was just wondering if anyone had already created a tweak like this or could point me to some other software that could easily/quickly do this. A guestbook might solve this problem, but I’d rather tweak bbpress (if no one else has already) to do this because it’s such a great base to work from…
thanks a lot for any advice.
Will the thread be changing? or is it just constant? If it’s constant, you definitely want a guestbook 
No-one, as far as I know, has done this. You could probably do it by changing the theme to only show one thread; best to also make some changes with plugins in the back-end, but probably not necessary.
Copy&Paste in a .htaccess:
DirectoryIndex /forum/topic.php?id=20
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} /forum/index.html
RewriteRule (.*) /forum/topic.php?id=20 [L]
Now (sorry for my bad english, im german) the topic is your forum-frontpage.. (dont forget to delete the “New Topic” links).
quick&dirty 
> using wordpress would work and that’s a good thought,
> but I would have to customize it quite a bit I think…?
No, not at all. Find a theme you like, create a static page, make that your home page, strip out the stuff you don’t want in the sidebar (for archives, pages, categories, search, blogroll, meta, etc) and that’s it. One topic with comments.
Or, a guestbook 
thank you very much guys. I really appreciate it — I have a lot of great recommendations to go on! (I haven’t had a lot of time to spend on wordpress or bbpress and I appreciate your help to make my customization time easier!)
how do you go about doing a guestbook for each user?
