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Do you miss community forums? Like, you would use one if it was available and related to something you're interested in / have questions about? We had one for many years. I haven't been tempted to restart it because it seems like more effort than community benefit... maybe?

We are overdue for the return of the more intimate communities of yore. Especially since their content can be indexed, greatly improving discoverability and longevity of shared knowledge. Big fan of both Discourse (RoR) and Xenforo (PHP) as off the shelf community solutions.

They may be intimate but they are objectively bad for the needs of a community like yalls. They are walled gardens with poor accessibility and discoverability. Information cannot be indexed by tools like search engines or wayback machine.

The emphasis on realtime has 2 major side effects: 1) its difficult to quickly catch up on discussions that interest you. Instead of scanning a couple thread titles you either read a wall of text or say “f it” and press “mark as read”.

2) if you want to join in on a convo you weren’t present for, you have to do some mental math of how much time and/or chat has passed vs how bad you want to chime in. So often that results in people feeling left out and disconnected from the community they care about.