For as long as I can remember the majority of the traffic on the Inkscape-user list has been discussion between users and developers. This discussion was necessarily techinical. In just the past few weeks there has been a noticeable outgrowth of user to user discussion. This is a great sign. Our community is growing in new directions. Fantastic.
Now, I'm pretty anti-forum myself. I've tried a few forum only communities and they just didn't fit. I like mailing lists better because I can aggregate all the traffic into a single place, sort into folders and see where there is new content and how much all with a single click! With forums I have to visit one website per forum and then drop down into the subforums just to see if any discissions I'm interested have new traffic. (Side note, I love that we have such a diverse cross section of the community participating actively in IRC. So cool to pop in the channel and get and give realtime answers and realtime feedback. Love it!) I've seen communities that do all their developer-developer communication in forums and private email, that model really aggravates me. I've also seen non techinical communities that have tried to start all their members in a mailing list. I really think that any time a large group of nontechincal users is required to search for preexisting content in a different place than where they would normally interact with new content, you will find a huge disaster as the same questions get beaten into the ground time and time again.
We've had a number of user requests for a forum for a while now. There are a few users who are happy with the current lists and don't think change is necessary. I think most of the devs have no strong oppinion. As an Inkscape developer, I really like to see users gain more and more techinical skills with inkscape and get sucked into the Inkscape-devel list. But I'm ready to admit that now is the time to let the debate of relative merits of various community discussion tools fade into the background. Let's debate the merits of various forum software packages. :-)
Aaron Spike