Open ended question. What's the "right" way to both conceptualize and implement discussion forums for the community around a product or service?
Forums stem from a desire to facilitate arbitrary and semi-structured user<->user conversations or user<->service owner conversations, possibly with or without moderation.
Is there something better suited to this desire than "forum software" (regardless of whether it does or does not already exist)? I know Get Satisfaction et all are a new approach to user<->service owner, but they really shut out the user<->user community aspect. I'm not aware of any new modalities of user<->user discussions.
If forums are still the best tool we have for this purpose, what are some of the latest and greatest implementations of forums? I like Vanilla quite a bit but their pricing seems a bit steep. phpBB and its ilk seem very dated and bloated. Something like lamernews could be interesting but there are no topical areas, just a pile of unsortable threads of discussion.
Reddit fits in here somehow too I suppose, although a service owner may want to "own" the users rather than outsourcing discussions to some subreddit.
Thoughts?
