Adding discussion forum to app

Folks,

I am looking around for the best way to add discussion forums to my
application. The application will be used by couple schools each of
which has many grades and each grade can have many sections and each
of the sections needs a forum of its own.

School-------has_many----> grades -------- has_many -----> sections

I need a separate forum for each section of each grade in each school.

In digging around I see that Savage Beast seems to be the most
recommended plugin to use for forums. I have the plugin installed and
some demo code from git sort of working. However before I take a
deeper plunge, couple questions and concerns that I hope some of you
can help me with.

  1. What are the other choices for a discussion forum in Rails (2.3.8)
    other than Savage Beast? Is there a comparison made somewhere?
  2. Can I set up one forum for each of the sections as I describe above
    using Savage Beast?
  3. I dug around for some description of how to create these separate
    forums but haven’t found anything. Is there some high level
    description somewhere of how it works - the README file that comes
    with plugin doesn’t have much in it

Please let me know if I am missing some obvious place to look into.
Appreciate any pointers you can provide and help with the questions
above.

Thanks,
-S