Community === Forum?

That’s a great project idea! From what I’ve seen, the need for a forum-style space depends on two things:

Community size & depth – Smaller groups often do fine with chat tools or social feeds. But once a community grows past a few hundred active members, threads and structured discussions become valuable to prevent ideas from getting lost.

Content longevity – If the community needs searchable, evergreen knowledge (guides, FAQs, debates), forums shine. For quick banter, real-time chat works better.

Many communities want forums but hesitate because:

They fear moderation overhead.

They think setup and maintenance will be too complex.

Members are already comfortable in Discord, Slack, or FB Groups.

Where you could stand out with Symposify is by reducing that complexity — making forums feel as easy as chat, while still giving the structure that communities eventually outgrow their chat apps to find.

It’s like studying with qurantajweedteacher.com: at first, learners may resist because it feels structured and more formal, but once they see the clarity and order it brings, they appreciate the system. Communities often go through the same journey with forums.

We're more and more tempted to stop using Discourse as it's competing directly with our online video rendezvous but our situation is singular.

There seems to be a big split in community software nowadays; it's either chat-based (Slack), a traditional forum or a group on Facebook. All have their pro's and cons I guess but forums seem to work really well for bigger communities where repetitive questions and such become a big problem.

Out of curiosity: What specific problems have you seen around with existing forums that you want to solve?

I think there is today a community, forum or group. They are usually the same only with a little different architecture. I think whatever you do you should approach it more Slack style or just much better. Something that I do not like about Telegram or the Facebook and WhatsApp groups is that they are very chaotic. However, that small change from slack or any of its imitations, allows you to have chaos on the right side, while on the left side you have order. The truth is that I am not a guru either, but I think a real opinion could help you more than a click on any of the options. Greetings.