Comment by qwerty456127
5 years ago
Classic forums never actually felt convenient. IMHO the best could be a StackExchange-like UI + HN-like hierarchical comments + allowance and convenience of repeating similar questions as the time passes (as the old answer may be inapplicable to a newer version or just not complete enough for a new person facing the same problem even why satisfactory for the previous one) + more permissive policy in regard of opinionated questions and answers.
The best engine for this I have seen so far in Reddit (I men Old Reddit of course) and IIRC it has its source code open so anyone can run their own.
From the pragmatic point of view I can see nothing comparable to GitHub Issues + Pages. A problem would have to be hell of importance to me to motivate me sufficiently to register on another website like a specific project's BugZilla but on GitHub everyone can find everything at one place and participate straight away as everybody apparently has a GitHub account nowadays anyway.
Have you ever used a Discourse forum? I've found them to be by far the most convenient, and would rate above old Reddit.
Not really. Any example I could take a look at? I generally hate every more-than-2-user discussion engine which doesn't enforce hierarchical threads (making message-response relation always defined and clear and the whole chain easily traceable) and/or encourages real-time communication.