It always boils down to project’s maturity and the effort put in maintaining the docs. The best projects are the ones with lots of the effort. No matter if this is Wiki, FAQs, Tutorials, In-code docstrings, Live chat, Forums… I probably could name some projects, where every one of these channels is a main channel of support and the support is great. But it always comes with an effort. The channel is secondary for me. If I could choose, in-code docstrings are most useful for me, when developing for Rust/Autonomi. And the second one would probably be Stackoverflow – it is indexed well and has good QA features, but it’s probably mostly for the future, when we have lots of dev users active.
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We will know we have arrived when we see Autonomi on this page. 
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This forum is very questionable on all counts if those are the requirements too. Which isn’t an argument against this forum - it isn’t my list of requirements - but leads me to wonder if there are (still - after all of @happybeing’s efforts!) some biases working against the dev forum in this case.
forum.autonomi.community stands up thusly, from my perspective:
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Muddying comms to newcomers with outdated info: Bucketloads of outdated info here, the whole past is here! Tons more than the dev forum, in absolute terms anyway.
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Frequented and doesn’t give the impression of a dead project: Here is definitely more frequented, but I think it’s at least debatable whether it gives the impression of a “living project” to an uninitiated outsider. A living project, or yet another crypto project going around in circles self-promoting. I don’t think the latter is the reality, but to a newcomer, I wouldn’t be sure they’d be more confident after landing here and spending 30m, or landing on the dev forum and spending 30m.
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Can be adequately staffed and supported to be useful: here has arguably not been adequately staffed and supported whatsoever in recent months. Again, I don’t know what’s going on internally, I understand there have been some huge changes recently, some illnesses, lots of hard work behind the scenes, etc, I’m not trying to criticise anyone. But this forum doesn’t pass this one at all in the past many months.
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Low friction to get the info they need: again, no pass here, I think it should be obvious to everyone. Here is a morass, there are dragons lurking. I can navigate it, I’ve learned to use discourse, I’ve ignored topics and members and I know who the loose canons are, who the trustworthy critics are, who the experienced genies are, who the nutjobs are, etc. It’s anything but low friction, though.
Anyway, again, this isn’t against anyone in particular, just an outside perspective in case it helps.
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If we survive here, it will already be an accomplishment.
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If neither forums are passing this criteria… the perhaps we need a different solution then?
(I do really lament the fact you can no longer create a custom stack exchange site. Never really understood that decision)
I don’t see this at all. In this forum;
- There are weekly updates with dates in the title, going back a long time. Anyone new can catch up with the latest updates easily, knowing it’s up-to-date info.
- Frequent updates and regular activity make it very clear that this is a live and progressing project.
- Team members frequently engage in discussion and post here.
- It’s easy to search for info, and ask questions if you need to clarify anything.
I don’t see how this forum does badly on any of those measures.
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I think Stackexchange is the next step after a Forum. When there’s too much happening on forum and questions are repeated, then it’s time for SE in my opinion. Apart from that, forum has still some qualities SE doesn’t, like off-topic talk, sharing opinions, recommendations etc.
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Btw there is a discussion with a poll on a Dev Forum regarding its viability:
There’ve been polls and discussions about it on there since 2019, and here we are again
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… with dev forum revived and dev category in main forum still non-existent.
Mind also, that the question in 2019 was about merging old forum into this one, not closing it. I think it was said earlier, that merging is not possible due to some technical/privacy issues, right?
Yes, that’s correct