Are there plans to make a Songbird discussion forum?

There a number of great open source forum software. This site isn't really a forum.

Hi amp68. I'm really curious. What do you feel a traditional forum would do for you that Get Satisfaction doesn't?

The feel of a forum is just different. I think it lends itself better to community participation. Don't get me wrong, this is very nice, but I think a forum is better.

Yes, please provide an official forum and not some 3rd party web service ...

Compared to a classic forum this here just doesn't cut it. It's cluttered with all sorts of stuff on the page, I guess I would prefer uservoice.com instead if I have to.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone as I think the volume, for a app like Songbird, of users it just too low. This is from my experience with other OS apps and their forums from the past 10 years ...

Btw, I just lost my message I wrote because of this :-(

This place is just way to busy. A proper forum is more conducive to discussion.

i agree. a classic forum would be very helpful.

If there is one thing I have detested about Songbird is lack of a forum. There is no easy way to discuss ideas, solve problems or just talk about the program. This service doesn't lend itself to easily finding topics, etc.
Maybe it takes getting used to, but if the forum solution is what we are familiar with and it isn't broken, why use this odd setup?

I think that there could be better community discussion and collaboration on projects in a more forum-like Songbird discussion board. The way GetSatisfaction has been updated today, it seems to be focused more on helping new people find an answer quickly instead of keeping regular people participating in discussion. I did find that you can get it more like the old way by viewing all topics.

I would like to have more topics though like the open comment thread or the release naming convention thread, more for discussion than getting help to problems. Or see topics where people could help each other on add-ons, and discuss broader topics like the general interface of Songbird. I think an open-source project might need a more robust discussion forum to help it evolve through the progress of the community.

It just seems like now, every time I load getsatisfaction.com/songbird, all of the topics are the same except for the 6 displayed under recent activity. For people who come here often to discuss ideas, it can be hard to see what topics are actually popular with discussion. Viewing All topics makes it better though. But now, when a topic is "active", it doesn't even say if someone made a new post or if it just got bumped up by someone pressing the "I like this idea!" button, so I keep checking topics that don't have any new comments in them. I just wish it would go back to showing you if someone posted in a topic, and maybe color the backdrops of the topics again so the site doesn't look so bland. :P

It did finally motivate me to seek out the GetSatisfaction GetSatisfaction page and comment about the service.

I agree with you Murphy on that the main page lacks info... It just states the 3 most popular questions, ideas, and problems at the top... Not very friendly for existing community members (or new users either...)
But besides that.. it is what it is... from what I see, you can do exactly what you could do in other "forums" - but better in my opinion.. Go ahead and create "topics where people could help each other on add-ons, and discuss broader topics like the general interface of Songbird."... then people can star it to follow it (I'm pretty sure I'm following every topic you posted :-D).. and go crazy in posting replies, comments, suggestions and such... much better than an [ugly] forum IMO.
I think a great picture of how great GS can be is stevel's Idea Kitchen(sometimes I just look at it to look at it :-P). Maybe a page similar to that for advanced discussion/help/tips that also coincides with the Google Dev group might be of interest...

unless you can implement a forum with openid login that's not a piece of crap no thanks. Just how many of the posters here have posted because they can use their Windows Live ID or Open ID?

I don't have an OpenID or a Windows Live ID. And I post all over the place.