What exactly is the intended purpose of this forum? Questions are answers? We have a Matrix room for that too. Recommendations, we have the repo for that too?
The forum also supports messages, and has a leaderboard and rewards system. Is it a kind of social media?
This is an open question. I’m curious to hear perspectives.
Chat rooms are bad for long term discussion.
And I want all the points, make me #1 already. 
The “flow” of a forum vs chat is way different.
Chat is more ephemeral and in the moment. You can get quick answers sometimes, and find interesting conversation, but topics change quickly, and if nobody responds to your question or comment within the first few seconds or minutes, it’ll usually be buried and forgotten, whereas with a forum, with a forum, being more centered on topics/subjects, and slower paced, topics or questions can stay active for days, months, or years. Its also much more conducive to helping a broader range of people (if a question gets answered on matrix, the asker and anyone present on the matrix room at that moment in time, might see the answer, but thats it, with a forum, posts have much more reach and staying power, A question answered on discourse, can be found through a search or search engine, months or years later, and help other people who have the same question.
I also see chat like matrix as a much more casual communication channel.
Attackers cycle through endless matrix.org accounts to raid our rooms to harass our team and community members, troll and spam gore or CSAM (Child Sex Abuse Material). Moderation actions taken to counter these raids is the main way large Matrix rooms get bricked.
https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/1727441191204253905#m
That’s why I stopped using Matrix and would rather stick to Discord or forums like this. Discourse (the software this forum runs on) and Discord at least have proper moderation tools.
Here is a load of other issues with Matrix: why not matrix? – Telegraph
Thank you for all your answers (so far)!
On a personal note, I am leaving the forum, because I don’t really use Privacy Guides myself, and don’t really need the resources on here either.
I also don’t like that it’s basically a form of social media (for me personally), that you need an another account for (I don’t like single sign-on).
I may show up in the future, on the repo or the Matrix room, but for now, it’s been nice contributing here!
This feels right to me and is why I’m here. With so many divergent opinions on privacy, it’s good to be able to ask questions and see what comes back from a knowledgeable audience.
(I might wish the community here was a bit larger, and I guess it also probably skews towards agreeing with the philosophy of the site recommendations, but it’s still one of the best places I’ve found to ask privacy questions and get some thought-provoking answers. I was going to say a stackexchange site for privacy might be nice but I just did a web search and realised there is at least the privacy tag on their security site.)
I really don’t like chat for lots of reasons, but in particular, if my question isn’t urgent and I ask it in chat, the response I get will depend on who’s around at that particular point, so I’m less likely to hear different views. And if the chat is busy with some random banter or something, I might get no answer at all.
We only discuss website changes here on this forum, not on Microsoft’s proprietary issue tracker, so that’s the main thing.
It’s also just a Q&A in a better format than Matrix, as many others have mentioned. I rarely see super useful conversations in Matrix, and the ones that do exist get lost very easily, but good discussions are common here.
Sorry to see you go, but thanks for your contributions!
Probably to some degree yes. But the nice thing is that for each recommendation on the site, there is usually a corresponding github and/or forum post where it is discussed and debated before it gets added. So you can dig deeper, if you want to understand why something was listed (or rejected) and see what people agreed on and where there were differences of opinion.
So while I don’t agree with every single recommendation, I respect the process and thought that goes into each recommendation, even the ones that don’t completely align with my thinking.
I hope to see you around again. Here or on matrix or wherever.
One thing before you go, I know one of your issues with the forum is not liking how leaderboard/gamification aspect of discourse affects your behavior/thinking. You should know that if you use uBlock Origin, you can hide all of those elements in the sidebar if you want (I just tested to make sure it works). Personally I don’t mind them, and rarely even notice they are there, but if they are distracting or unwanted to you, its not hard to hide them.
I agree with this sentiment, just in case it wasn’t clear from my earlier post. I don’t follow or intend to follow some of the recommendations on this site, but at least being able to see the reasoning instead of it being asserted without argument that X is the One True Way means I can understand why the recommendation was made and feel comfortable ignoring it in spite of that.
I find Matrix in most cases cumbersome and inefficient. Using Element, if i want to find a discussion about something in a busy forum the search commonly takes more than 30 seconds or just times out. And when the search results finally do appear it can be extremely slow to sort through all the results to find a legit answer. Often it is simply a waste of time trying to weed through answers to questions. If I had a choice between using Matrix and a forum like this for topical conversations I would always choose the forum.