Two things...
First, it sounds that there are some strong feelings on both sides here
- for having more forums as well as for keeping things unified. While
passion can be good, please let's try to ensure discussions remain civil and polite. I'm sure with friendly discussion, good compromises can be found on this topic.
Second, regarding forums, this topic comes up from time to time. Our official position has been if someone wishes to set up and maintain an independent forum, it's cool by us. However, we've been down this road a few times and there's been some good observations made in this and past threads:
It's better for the community as a whole to have just a few forums, since it consolidates the knowledge to one place.
As a project, Inkscape is open to setting up an official http://forums.inkscape.org site, but we'd need volunteers to be committed to setting up and maintaining it on an ongoing basis. We'd also be open to hosting it on the same machine as inkscape.org, PROVIDED that the selected forum software is a) available in Gentoo, and b) is reasonably free from security issues.
Some people prefer mailing lists, others prefer forums. There are some mailing-list-to-forum gateways that some people find adequate, but others don't. There are a lot of different opinions on which is the best forum software to use. Thus, obviously our choices are to either have a lot of different forums, none of which are very heavily used, or a small number of forums (perhaps just one) that are heavily used but that some proportion of people dislike.
While open to having forums, most of the currently active Inkscape contributors are okay with mailing lists. Thus, if we as a community are to have an Inkscape forum beyond the mailing lists, and if we want it to be an official central unified forum, the effort is going to need to be driven by the larger Inkscape community. In other words, what we need are some new folks to join in on this challenge, get it all organized, and help maintain it going forward.
Bryce
Now that's an answer! May I suggest changing the "Mailing-list" section name on the main page to "Mailing lists and forums" and adding at the top of the page something in the lines of the following?
"You can currently access the contents of the mailing list in forum format through [insert the url of that forum interface. I forgot what it is].
We currently do not have plans for a separate "official" forum. If you have any questions on this, please read the following: [insert link to the above]."
Provide an answer people can easily see and find, and maybe they'll stop asking. :)
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