What we really need is a really good feed of suggested topics and an email campaign to reveal them. Reddit absolutely mastered this. I used to be an occasional Reddit … then the emails came and they were relevant and fun and I enjoy getting that email. Actually, I mostly just go direct to Reddit now.
Looking back. I probably should’ve selected Discourse as the forum engine. The deployment strategy, at the time, was more complex than I wanted. I had a grudge against Ruby on Rails projects (kinda still do). But the UI was clean. I bet the API is cleaner and less breaking. Making another change might cause more churn though.
