Simple forum OR Q&A page

Hey all-
I’m currently building a website for a small subdivision HOA - one of their requests is a page where residents can publicly ask questions - and then receive answers - not unlike this very forum. It would, of course, need to be moderated. I installed a Vanilla forum years ago - and that would probably work. But, I’m wondering if there are better options? And, how difficult/expensive is it to add a page like this to their site? The page will be protected by Sitelok - so I don’t have to worry (to much) about spammers getting access.

A forum system like Discourse or Vanilla might be overkill, IMO. And a CMS possibly affords too much edit-ability.

I found, downloaded and installed a free platform called Question2Answer. I had it installed and fully working within MAMP in about 2 minutes. It looks like it will do everything you want. Plus it has a couple of other nice features like RSS support, tags, searching, ratings and filtering. It’s mobile and tablet compatible. Here are some quick screenshots from my experiment:

The only weakness I can find is that it does not support image uploads straight out of the box - you instead have to link to images already shared online. So I guess if someone in the HOA wanted to show a picture of something like a pothole, a broken fence or unsafe tree, they would have to upload it to somewhere like Flickr first, and then provide the URL to it.

Other than that, it looks like a perfect system.

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Thank you @willwood - this looks like it will be perfect. It was super easy to install, and I’m brining it in using Limelight (into a Sections Pro area).