Since y'all are giving the forum some polish and there seems to be some impetus behind the changes, how bout a stack exchange type system for AGS?
For specific questions a forum is not a particularly good way of doing it since it encourages divergent conversation. Also, a SE type system could give rewards to those who answer a lot of questions thus giving (weak) incentive to help others.
For those who are unsure of what Stack Exchange is take a look at http://stackoverflow.com/
Its basically a system whereby users can ask questions and get answers which they can then flag as answered. That way it allows people to easily see which questions are unresolved so they can be answered and it allows questions to be easily indexed for searching.
If there's some interest I would be happy to help with coding the backend (since the FOSS systems currently available are pretty shitty) providing there were people to assist with the visual design.
How is this different from the technical forum?
It's structurally different but functionally much the same.
It's simply more organised and more useful for those browsing after the fact. Questions can have tags, answers can be flagged as correct, users who answer correctly get points which tends to increase user participation.
These are all reasons why the stack exchange network is so much more popular than any programming forum you can name (this is probably not true but used for hyperbole).
I'm not much experienced wie SE systems, just seen them when googling for a specific problem, but I'm wondering if it's tailored for the type of technical questions we have here.
As far as I know, SE is mainly for one-question-one-answer topics, and while it's possible to leave comments to an answer, it's not intended to lead to long discussions. But here we deal more often with follow-up questions and people guiding through several steps, so a non-chronological order of the answers and the selection of a definite correct/best answer might not be the way to go?
That's true, but perhaps long discussions are not ideal.
The model does seem to work for single issue topics like AGS tho. http://answers.unity3d.com/ for instance seems to be useful and popular despite unity also having a forum.
Yes please!
I'd love a system like this and think it is well worth having one made!