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