So far the decision to put up forums has worked out extremely well for me. I hope the users are finding it useful as well. 🙂

In just over 2 months, 94 users (+ guests) have created over 650 posts. Awesome! I’ve found that I’m able to to answer questions less often via e-mail and instead point people to relevent threads (and to the docs, and my blog posts). I’ve also found people willing to post their questions in the forums when I’ve asked them to (sometimes they e-mail me first), which helps get information out there to be found.

I still plan to integrate mailing lists into the mix, but I back-burnered it when I discovered what a nightmare it is trying to get the body of an e-mail. Depending on how the e-mail is sent, there seem to be a half dozen places you need to check for the e-mail body – yuck! Anyway, I plan to get them (at least the beta mailing lists) up and running before the next Tasks/Tasks Pro™ beta cycles.

Making the PunBB changes available is still on my to-do list, but I’ve got a few things I need to wrap up before I get to that. I’ve been working on another PunBB implementation that uses a different display for the latest posts that will be compatible with more PunBB installs. The implementation on the alexking.org forums only works well if you have a ton of categories.

If you’ve got feedback on the forums, I’d be happy to hear it – the comments are open.