[jdf-dev] User forums: should we dump them?

[Pete Muir]

One idea I was throwing around last week was whether we should get rid of user forums totally. Here's why:

1) No one is using the user forum, everyone is using the disqus comments
2) If you think about what goes into a user forum, it's:
   * questions
   * bug reports
   * announcements
   * misc other stuff

If we dig into (2), I think it's fair to say that questions would be better addressed by a stackoverflow Q&A approach, bug reports should go in the bug tracker anyway, announcements should go in the news, or on twitter or blogs, and that I can't come up with any good examples of what other stuff there is (and in all honesty, twitter probably can cope with the rest of it).

It's also worth nothing that we can embed a Q&A system nicely into pages (e.g. people can ask questions on a specific page) probably, which I think will be a popular way to interact, especially if we integrate it well with comments.

This isn't something we can do right now (we need to look at good ways to do it) but I wanted to throw the idea out, and see if any ardent forum fans come out of the woodwork...

Pete