I think it's a good discussion to have, especially since there was never a point when we could have it in maemo.org.

There are some practical concerns too. The vbulletin license agreement makes collaborative development of the sort we would expect to have in such a community (eg people developing / testing locally and pushing their changes via git) quite hard and costly.

True, and the discussion seems to have gone into vbulettin vs phpbb mode rather too quickly :-( I don't use forums much so don't know what's out there, but it there's something that fits the needs (which haven't actualyl been clearly defined yet) better it deserves at least a look. What, if any, are the viable OSS options?

If on the other hand VB really is the best available option so be it.

Reggie is a valuable resource to be sure, but he's not an infinite resource and he may not be around forever.