[impdev] What to do with the forums?

[Armin Weatherwax]

tl;dr: rename "Viewer" to "Feature Ideas", archieve "Development" 
and "Project", keep the rest for now; think about making the forums 
user self-organized in the long run.

My experience with forums and related media in general is that there are 
some that work and others that don't.

Of the variety of those that don't one sub category is developer driven 
forums - not specific for Imprudence, not even specific for open source 
software, and not even specific for software. As soon as THEY show up 
on a regular basis there are several admirers and a few revolutionists 
but the direction is always the same: top-down. Anyone waits  that THEY 
say a word to their topic.
 
About forums that work: there is always a group of people on the same 
level of power, interested in something they have in common.
No matter if collectors of old tube radios, or cactus growers, or the 
ubuntu-users forums. Yes there are also some forum gods, but those are 
rather forum gods because of the quality of their posts, or because 
they are voted by forum users as moderators. Still no one of them is a 
cactus herself, the communication is on eye level. Might be and 
probably ubuntu devs read through the ubuntu users forums, and might be 
or probably they give also support there, but thats nothing anyone 
expects. Usually you get an answer from just another user - and thats 
exactly why it works. No waiting that THEY show up.

So my thought about the forums: Provide the technical infrastructure
and let the users organize them. Users vote for their gods which are 
responsible for forum-technical things, moderation, despamming, 
creating new and archieving old sub forums, *but not for fixing viewer 
bugs or having a new viewer feature implemented*. Developers are just 
users in that picture. This has only upsides: no more waiting that THEY 
say a word about where to rebake textures, no more claims that a topic 
was censored to hide a negative feedback, no more -not asked for- self 
censoring by not saying $VOLDEMORT.

But well, probably takes some time to get there ... lol.
My proposal as the future just another forum user for a new structure:
* The forum "Viewer" could be renamed to "Feature Ideas"
* "Problems & Troubleshooting"- well, lets see how the troubleshooter 
works.
* new forum about trouble with servers for the kind of "hey is it just 
me, or is $GRID down without saying in the grid status page?" things.
* "Development" could be archieved holding a sticky topic pointing to 
irc, mailing list, and dev meetings.
* "Project" same as "Development".
* "Forum Organizing" will be needed if/when the forums get user  
organized.
*  "General" just keeping, if not/as long as not  the forums are user  
organized: as Boroondas proposes, and pointing to the wiki article 
which points to where to communicate best for which purpose.
* "Off Topic" just keeping. 
* Having a look at "Off Topic" topics: some users are presenting 
creative things they do with the viewer. That feels absolutely on-topic 
for me, and could get a new forum (I have no idea for a good name for 
that though).

Armin