[Fender]

I’m not even considering Joomla for this. Joomla is for the news part of our site and not a consideration for this at all.

I’m basically tossing up between bbPress and WordPress.

I like the bbPress plugin bbPress Moderation Suite because it will allow my moderators to ban users for a period, generate an email and automatically remove the ban once it expires. However, I’m yet to find a way to reverse the order of posts in a topic so it’s most recent to least recent.

However, I find it easier to limit WordPress to only showing a “single topic” because, essentially, I can just post a single item and have the Comments do the rest. With some minor tweaks I can have the default WordPress page as the single post and remove other navigation features. I have the plugin for reversing the sort order so that’s covered too. But the user moderation features don’t appear to match that of “bbPress Moderation Suite” and I’m keen to have that for my moderators.

Basically, I’m looking for forum-like features with the following constraints:

• a single topic and viewing it is the default page
• descending sort order
• no user private messaging

If I can then add poll and live chat plugins, as well as some basic filtering options by allowing posters to tag their posts, that would be a bonus.