Uh, where to start... Let me first express how important forums are - I absolutely hate mailing lists (even tho most of the projects I'm contributing to are handled that way) and I solemnly swear that I won't develop and contribute, heck I won't even shake a stick at anything that is handled by mailing lists ever again! Forums have much easier structure to follow, threading is much better and it doesn't depend on particular user's mail client, you can do more detailed searches, you can have far better data structure and you can easily ignore noise, and all that in a fairly easy and user friendly manner. And that's what puts forum systems ahead of any `social networking` system I have ever seen. Forums just work! Same goes for IRC, I left that type of communication in mid '90s and times of BBS, and I have no desire to go back to that. So, for me it's clear, no forums == no me on MeeGo.

Anyway, first about the forum system, Drupal is way too basic for the needs of an extensive community, it would be a PITA to use it even here, and it would exponentially grow to a major PITA on a community that should unite all MeeGo users. No matter how much more I prefer non-proprietary solutions, Drupal just doesn't cut it. Then again, vBulletin also lacks (to my knowledge, never installed it on my servers to look in the back of it) several crucial features - one of them being ability to mark several posts for quotation in response, I prefer to reply to several posts in one post (reduces clutter), and in current t.m.o I actually have to open several tabs using 'Quote & Reply' and then merge all the quotes into a single post. I guess my preferable option would be IPB, tho it also lacks some other things. Maybe a half-breed between vBulletin and IPB if that would be possible

Either way, besides the regular ones, it must have features such as ability to completely ignore complete sub-forums that are of no interest to you (even if it has to be done through group memberships), it must have a good search (good search == everything that better searches the forums than Google themselves), it must have thanks/rating/kudos/whatever system for rewarding productive members of the community (and for couple of other things I'll mention in that other thread about Karma) and ranking threads, and it would be very sweet if it could have multiple quotations (interface wise), tags, attachments and such.

On to the structure, I'm somewhat undecided should t.m.o be transferred there or left here. At one hand, all the current Maemo devices have nothing to do with MeeGo, so it's somewhat natural for Maemo discussion to remain here, but then we might be creating a huge community split - I for one will probably, with time, focus only on one of the forums. Also if we are to transfer all the data from here on meego.com in a possibly separate sub-forum, we'd have to transfer all the members as well, and some might don't want that, and others might not deserve that.

So, I'm for tabula rasa on meego.com, with a possibility to transfer members from here, but only optionally. One of the simplest way to do that is to reserve all the available active users on t.m.o there, but to set expiration date of a week with no login, and post an announcement here. That way only really active users (who wish that) will move there, and after a week anybody could take their nickname or whatever.

I'm perfectly aware that either way it's approached, it will probably mean slow death to t.m.o, but a community is not about a domain or some specific forum - it's about the people.

And in the end, I actually think that the most difficult thing would be to create an useful structure on the new forums as it will no longer be about several devices, nor about Nokia, it will be far broader and it's hard to integrate discussions about some future car multimedia system, a handheld device, a TV and a microwave (why not? ). Maybe it should be something like:

I wouldn't split development per device type (at least when it comes to Applications), but rather encourage users to either use tags, or even better to integrate in their title what device/platform are they targeting in the title name (e.g. [N900] App Name, or [Maemo 5] App Name... ). That way people that explore the future development might get an idea for application for a platform that might not be available or provided by the original developer, or people using devices not supported might encourage that person to develop a version for that platform...

Also, I think that Moblin guys should be included in this discussion, after all, we are merging communities. If they don't want to come here, let us set up a neutral ground somewhere and address both sides of the MeeGo coin.

That would be my somewhat lengthy 2¢...