Using the forum as the main discussion platform for tagging

[davidoskky]

@davidoskky

I feel that the best option would be to delegate to the author of the original topic the duty of curating a list of all other related topics into the original message, so that everyone can easily retrieve all conversations. This is far from ideal, since this should be automated by the system.

There are some complications to this.
As explained here (Edit messages time limitation) the creator of the topic cannot edit the post for as long as he wants.
Uses with trust level 0 and 1 can edit posts only during the 24 hours following the post creation; while users with trust level 2 can edit post for one month.
Attaining level 2 should not be too complicated, but it still requires the user to log in the forum in 15 different days; thus requiring at least half a month before they can manage such a discussion.

30 days to initiate and conclude a discussion looks like a good amount of time, however the approval of any feature requires at least one month to be concluded: the voting on the proposal has to be started at least 2 weeks after the RfC and the voting itself has to last two weeks.
Thus, one month to maintain the discussion could not be enough.
Under these circumstances this solution might not be appropriate to deal with this kind of discussions.
Some other possible solutions to keep the discussions ordered have been proposed:

• Turn a topic into wiki mode where anyone with TL1 can edit. (here)
• Append tags to a topic and all the related ones to make the easy to search and to subscribe to the topic (here)
• Increase the edit time limit or remove the limitation completely (here)