In the thread on the future of meta.MO, there is discussed the possibility of migrating to SE and keeping meta.MO but renaming it "discuss.MO". Apart from the fact that that name feels too close to "disgusted of MO" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgusted_of_Tunbridge_Wells for non-UK readers), there are inevitably some technical aspects that would need sorting out, together with the fact that if we're modifying stuff we may as well take the opportunity to modify more than is strictly necessary.

So I'm starting this thread to get an idea of what the technical aspects of this change would be for meta.MO. To be absolutely clear, the underlying assumption of this thread is that MO will migrate to SE, the SE-style meta will exist for things that it is designed for (technical feature requests, bug reports, .... not a lot else), and this site will morph into a "discussion" site (which it really has been all along). Under those assumptions, what would be needed or desirable to keep this site running and keep it a part of the MO scene?

Here's a few things that occur to me (and taken from Anton's comments in the above-linked thread):

1. From the SE side, there would need to be links to this site wherever there are links to the SE-style meta.
2. Some sort of linking of identities.
3. OpenID login.
4. Some ability to "migrate" posts from the SE-meta to this one. At the very least, one should be able to cut-and-paste the source from an SE post and know that it will render correctly here. Would this mean we'd need MathJaX here?

The software that runs this forum is called "Vanilla". It is a PHP forum. It is the same software that runs the nForum and the forum for the Azimuth Project. It is extremely customisable, and I have some experience with customising it.