Has anyone built a discussion forum with a Creator Portal?

Has anyone built a discussion forum with a Creator Portal?

I have built a Creator app for organisations to apply for refurbished tools that are sent by a charity.  The charity now wants recipient organisations to be able to connect with each other within a region or country, to share advice on maintaining the tools etc.

I can create a new Creator app with a customer portal, but I can't quite visualise how a discussion would work.  How do I set it up to display a post and all its reply comments? Do I need a stateless form with embedded html/zml to display previous comments while a new comment is being added?  Or is there a better way?

Alternatively, is there an integration that would handle a community forum better than Creator?