With the upcoming release of Tasks 2.0 and a steady stream of people buying Tasks Pro™, I’m trying to decide how best to handle beta, support and feature discussions.

The options I’m currently looking at:

1. Yahoo Groups

   Pros: I already have these in place with people signed up and using them. The e-mail notifications are nice as is the ability for people to subscribe to ‘special notices only’ and just get release announcements. Searchable archives are better than nothing.

   Cons: You have to have a Yahoo account to sign up, the archives are not categorized by ‘bugs’, ‘feature requests’, etc.

2. Forums (I’m looking at PunBB right now)

   Pros: Many people are familiar and comfortable with them. The discussions become a public knowledge base and are gategorized and searchable. The ability to run polls with associated discussion is pretty nice.

   Cons: Even with e-mail notifications, people have to go to the forums, the discussions don’t come to them.

   If I decided to go with the forums, should I have one big forum with high level categories for each product? Or should I have separate forums? At this point it would be one on taskspro.com and one on alexking.org.

3. Discussion Mailing Lists

   Pros: Great for beta discussion with an active groups. The conversation comes to the participants.

   Cons: Even with public archives, these suffer from the same problems as the Yahoo Groups. Doesn’t work that well for support.

4. Announcement Mailing Lists

   I plan to create a mailing list for product release announcements for each product. These are really handy, I just need to set them up.

So what do you guys think? Are there some points I’ve missed that I should be thinking about? Are there other options that I’ve overlooked?

This post is part of the project: Tasks Pro™. View the project timeline for more context on this post.