Thx for these. I just looked through them all quickly, but I'll definitely take a more detailed look over time as well.
Like you mentioned, Beginnerbikes, the Ultimate Subaru forums, and yotatech aren't using any additional software, they just set up subforums with threads and closed the threads after a single post. No reason we couldn't do that, but I'm not sure it adds much from the standard forum format. At some point our Tech forums may have enough content that a natural progression to single reference articles could occur.
Cycle Chaos is close to what I was thinking; I do like how the user database is synced across the two platforms. I'm actually not sure how they did it; people online are screaming about how hard it is to link vbulletin and mediawiki. One possibility is they are using this hack:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=191186
I'm not comfortable installing it until they get it working with the latest version of MediaWiki and vB, but it could be promising. I don't like that the interface/feel/style is completely separate, but that may not be a dealbreaker.
The
Subie forum uses mediawiki, but it looks like they didn't integrate user id/passwords; and you need to set up a new and separate account to interact with the wiki. I wouldn't want to go in that direction.
I need to learn more about what AppleInsider is doing. I can't find reference to the vbArticles hack, and I thought that was pulled awhile back. But maybe there is a newer supported Articles hack that they are using, or they wrote their own.
TBC...