I generally like Simple Machines Forum, but don't know what it would have to tie into: Drupal? Something else?

And I guess there's the overall question of what we'd gain/lose with adding forums. I've tended to see them as best for quick Q&A, and for lots of discussion, but not as good for long-form posts or other publishing. I'd see forums as being a lower barrier to entry on posting a question, but I'd worry that it would get deluged with trivial, entirely non-Debian, or otherwise poorly thought out questions, and many questions would lie as fallow as some of those types of blog entries^*.^* Which reminds me of a graduate student on a project I was working on. For two weeks, he says "we're getting these extra bytes in the serial data, and I don't know why," "there's no reason for these to be there," "we're going to have to reverse-engineer the serial protocol," and "I've posted in forums, and nobody knows why these are there!" His advisor asks me to help him out; he gives me the extra bytes that are showing up in the serial stream, and within 30 seconds of searching Google for the extra bytes and his hardware environment, result #5 is a mailing list posting with his exact problem, linking to a 9-page PDF of the entire serial protocol. All done. What I did not tell the student is that there's a difference between "nobody knows why these are there" and "everybody who read your posting thought 'there is no way I'm dealing with this guy who hasn't done his homework'".

To be honest: I don't want to see a forum on here at all! There are enough debian/linux forums out there (and google!).
I read DA on a daily basis, usually during breakfast at work and I enjoy it. The tech level is in my eyes intermediate to advanced and that's awesome. I ve seen so much good reading on here and this site helped me so much to bring my debian skills to a higher level and helped me to find new stuff to try. I m scared of that the level will drop and that the forum will get flooded with questions on how to install grub with windows. I think this site should keep doing what it can do best and what it makes it different to other debian sites: Serving good howtos and articles.
The Recent weblogs are almost forum styled posts and thats the perfect mixture and amount to read and follow. A forum would be too overwhelming.
I see this site/community more as a resource site then a Q&A site, there is also nothing wrong in my eyes to "miss use" the Recent weblogs for a good sophisticated "opinion/questions and answer" section. I wouldn't hesitate to do so because I know I would reach the right people on here.

This is my personal opinion, if the trend goes toward a forum - no problem - fine with me and who knows, it could be also a win for the community and give this site a new impulse. So in general, I m mwrs opinion.
What are your reasons to introduce a forum or why do you feel we need one? The "miss used" Recent Weblogs?

I'm not opposed to the idea of a forum, but as people can and do post comments to both blogs and articles in a way you could say the DA.org site is a forum in all but name already.

There are useful things to be found on the various forums out there but the signal to noise ratio is much lower than this site. On balance I'd say, as others have, leave things the way they are now.

On the topic of forum software, we use the Perl based YaBB at work, the code is awful but it has got somewhat better over time and I gather it's a lot better than the security nightmare that is the PHP versions of the same.

--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam

I see that the consensus is already "no extra forums", but i just wanted to throw my weight in on that side as well. d-a is already a set of forums, and a very high-quality one at that. Adding an additional forum engine would only dilute or distract from the good stuff going on here (not to mention adding yet another codebase for Steve to maintain).