Why has EOL created discuss.eol.org?

Short answer:

Going forward EOL needs a place for users, curators, partners and staff to communicate in a structured, manageable way, and this is it. We hope you like it.

Click for a longer answer:

[spoiler]We’ve tried a number of platforms in the past to communicate with the different communities we serve, including two incarnations of an EOL blog, a comment system on the website (not terrific), EOL communities (really not terrific) and a scratch-built forum (appallingly bad). Not only were these fragmented, but they didn’t allow for the sort of open dialog we wanted to foster.

So in advance of our next major release, realizing that we were missing out on an opportunity to foster a more active dialogue between and among everyone involved in EOL, we went looking for technologies that would support structured, civilized discourse across a whole range of topics. We believe this platform offers the best combination of usability, flexibility, manageability and stability among the options at hand.

Our goal is to consolidate all EOL-centered user discussions here, from curation to content commentary to random shout-outs to feature comments and on down. We will comment on topics like single signon and how we will indicate the presence of curation comments on the eol.org website in a separate post.[/spoiler]

We will leave this post open for your questions regarding our decision process - if you have specific functionality or usability questions, please start them as new topics in this category.