I agree with you on this, but a good social media strategy is needed to make this work. You already name 4 major networks and an etcetera, to which I would add LinkedIn (what I use instead of FB). If we have high value discussion and ideas arising in all these media it will be a huge PITA to bring it all together to this forum and/or the tools we use to follow them up (e.g. github, wiki, etc.).
The problem is that then we have N networks over which the CHT community is spread, we get people missing out, and duplicate discussions and content.
Not impossible to overcome, but requires much community effort to bring it all together again. Would work if all social media channels conducted traffic efficiently to this forum and follow-up tools.
Yes! I previously described this forum as a first-stage body of raw information to be followed-up with more appropriate tools, but maybe it should be considered 2nd-stage and the social media channels be the first-stage, targeted to community outsiders, and these channels be conductors of information to this forum, attractors of new community members.
Yes, this should be part of the solution. Maybe close the thread in that channel, if it was picked up and continued on the forum.
Yes, @ferj, @anon22019695, @patm and @Mamie , I strongly agree with you that we can only make significant changes to the other channels (or even closing them) can only occur once this forum is improved.
Like @Mamie said we are working on a plan to improve the Discourse forum, and this includes visual changes. Discourse has a feature that allows custom themes (using CSS files). We’ll provide a means for any member to participate in this, and we are thinking to provide Github issue lists to cooperate efficiently.
More info will follow. Until that time you can add suggestions to Suggestions for improvement to the community forum