At last, I've got Active Forums 4.0 preview release. This is not for productive use, so I'm considering this "forum beta testing embedded in game beta-testing", but I'm hoping that this might help with one particular issue: Communication!
Sounds kind of smart "a forum will help with communication". I know. But the point is that e-mail is becoming more and more a haunted communications medium. Haunted by the very evil ghost called "SPAM". There's others, but the consequences I perceive of what those incredible attacks of those spam-folks do to this medium are that e-mail has become an extremely unreliable communications medium.
Just very recently, I sent messages to two people to ask for permission whether I could use their names in my credits for my first screencasts. I waited for one day, for another day... and started wondering whether they were on vacation or something. Fortunately, those two fellow developers are both on the Unity forums, so I could contact them through private messages on those forums - and received immediate replies. And, they both had also replied to my original request via e-mail.
What happened? In order to stop those SPAM attacks, I had activated greylisting on my mail-server. For the technically interested who don't know about greylisting, yet: Ask Google. Unfortunately, this prevented those messages from getting through. And even worse: I don't think they had received error messages - so they didn't even know I didn't get their replies until I told them using an alternative communications medium.
The same is currently also happening the other way round: My server sends people verification e-mails to verify that their e-mail is working. This is a part of the registration process with the site. Today, I found out that some mail servers would reject those verification messages - without notice.
So, what I'm hoping to establish with those forums is an alternative way of contacting me and requesting support if that's needed. So, if e-mail fails, the forums are still there.
I did one thing that is kind of risky: I've created one "public forum" where anybody can post. It's very likely that as soon as this site gets any popularity, people while try to use that forum for "Google spamming" (another evil ghost haunting the Internet these days). Well, if they do, their efforts will be in vain and they'll be wasting not only my time, but also their own, because eventually, I'll exclude that forum from Google indexing (I hope that CAPTCHA still prevents automated forum posts for most people for a litlte while). And of course: I'll immediately delete any SPAM that is put in there.