I think E2 could use a discussion forum.

I don't know what people's initial reactions to this are going to be but hear me out. The way I'm reading it, E2 is kind of confused as to where it wants to go at the moment. Of course, I could be reading this wrongly. Again, if there was a forum running this wouldn't all be so hazy. It seems that there are questions which the admins would like to ask the users and right now there's no obvious way for people to respond. The new poll thing is a step towards getting those answers but selecting one of a small quantity of pre-set answers is a bit different from openly voicing your opinion. Originally I thought maybe we could use some sort of response thread to the polls to clarify matters, but then I realised we could use such threads elsewhere.

E2 has had this rule of "No GTKY" for a long time but I think maybe it's time to get to know each other. It's difficult to have a lengthy and in-depth discussion about something through the medium of /msgs because there, discussions can't be threaded - it's like an email conversation with a much stricter word limit. And discussing things in the chatterbox is fine, but if you're not there at that exact time, that's it, it's gone. You can look it up later using ascorbic's archive - if you somehow find out that it ever happened, of course - but you can't easily participate further.

I don't know how this would be implemented. I would expect that the forum would NOT take the form of a separate mini-site at everything2.com/forum or anything like that... more like a discussion page which would be attached to various nodes, like one for each poll, one for each node heading (maybe not one for each writeup though), one for each usergroup, one for the front page, others elsewhere... Is this a dumb idea?