Ok, let's face it - the native discussion list capabilities in SharePoint 2003 are - well - they're just "okay." They do work, but are just a little too frustrating in their implementation to use in the real world.

But Serge van den Oever has posted an announcement and a link to the SourceForge site where they have put together a release of the "Macaw Discussion Board," a list template that builds on top of the SharePoint native discussion lists and improves on the native functionality big-time.

It is great that SharePoint supports discussion lists, its a pity that their implementation is "suboptimal".

The two biggest problems that I have with the discussion lists are:

• When you reply on a discussion item, you don’t see the text you are replying on
• Discussion items are displayed in the wrong order: oldest items first!

Changing this behavior is not as easy as providing a new view. Some more work is required.

We worked around these limitations more than a year ago, but I never found the time to make these modifications available to the community. Until now…

They have also provided a discussion thread view in their list template.

So, before you run off to find a third party forum/discussion program to adapt to SharePoint because the default capabilities are too frustrating, you might want to see what you can do with Macaw's Discussion Board. You can check our Serge's announcement and documentation post and download the list template.