Before reading any of my response, please understand I am responding to communicate these issues and hopefully work towards some sort of improvement here. I am not bashing anyone's ideas, nor am I being stubborn with my views. I hope this sparks conversation that brings about changes and not just people getting angry with one another which is what tends to happen more often then not.
I definately don't think forums on another site are the answer. I have seen many DNN support sites come and go and honestly think that having more than one place would do more harm than good. Real quick, to speak about module retailers and their support sites, this is far beyond the control of anyone and I see this same behaviour even in component vendors. I have recently seen a company who's product I used completely disappear, and that had nothing to do with DNN. Simply put, it's just business.
I read over these posts here and I agree somethings need to change. The thing is, this is not going to happen from the core team alone nor changes to the forum module alone. While I think both are necessary, lots of this comes down to community participation beyond the 30 or so core team members. Even if you add the project leads into the mix, we are still only at 40 or so people and an honest quess of those that participate here often is maybe 15-20. Considering the number of posts per day and the fact there are other responsibilities beyond forum posts, these people alone cannot answer every question. I think the community outside of these teams are contributing. I do, however, feel that there is a higher number of newer users than experienced ones. After making the move here from ASP.NET the crowd of people has changed slightly.
To cover some of the things I have seen here:
Additional Forums for DNN Versions. - I don't think this is going to help at all. There are already many forums which makes finding answers difficult for newer users. Adding more forums will lead to confusion. I think we as a community should encourage people to state their DNN version in their post. No matter if someone is using 3.3.3 or 3.3.5, I often need to know the version number regardless. The other option would be an enhancement to the module itself, but I don't feel this is the answer either as it would require the ability to add a new version each release. As the developer of the module, I also don't see this being something most use cases would need and find it hard to justify the change.
Benefactor Forums - There are two seperate Private forums. One is to discuss the pre-releases, the other for support. These are monitored a bit better I must admit, but if someone is paying for some type of support don't they deserve that? This is a pretty common business model, and regardless if you like it or not, if you want beyond a volunteer effort you need money/resources involved. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of examples of free open source community spirit all over the place, but many open source projects offer some form of paid support.
Forum Module:General - I am the developer of the module. I am not making excuses for anything, this module does need some work. I have spent many hours over the past several months overhauling much of the module. This has been a long process because I am changing the foundation of the module so we can squash the bugs. I am covering existing bugs, necessary enhancements, usability issues, and things to help get people to the content they need. I continue to visit my module forum several times a week, if not several times a day. If you spend anytime in those forums, you will see that almost no post goes unanswered. I admit, I could spend more time answering questions in the general forum but honestly this would take away from my time to develop the module. We added the aggregated option (thanks Shaun) so it was easier for people to see the new posts from a single view. I am looking in a future version (not the next) to overhaul the email notifications. This requires some core work and is not something I can just make happen quickly.
Forum Module: Search - There are two ways to search the forums, the site and from the module. The site uses the core's indexing which is great but has the limitation of granular permissions. What I mean here is that the search indexer of the core cannot account for private forums. Because of this, the module only exposes non-private forums to the indexer. As a user, this means it can only index the things you see in the aggregated forums. As for the module's search I am actually working on that right now. This does allow you to search the private forums that you are able to see. There is a usability problem though, in that the DNNTree control used for forum selection does not allow me to programatically select all the child forums when selecting that checkbox. In the live version deployed here, this actually exposes a bug because I wasn't checking to see if the user selected a group or forum node before sending to search. If the group has an ID that does not exist as a forumID, it will throw an exception. I have changed this in my dev version with hopes of releasing before the end of the year. I am also looking at how to do a good job of searching the ntext field for the content body of a post. It is not possible to enable full text indexing on the column, so my options here are limited. I have had a difficult time duplicating some errors with search locally because I don't have the volume of data we have here on dotnetnuke.com. I am trying to optimize the query as is now using ANTS from Red-Gate. I am not sure everything will be great, but it will work much better after next release.
To close out this long post, I just want to add that many of us are trying to get things done. Everyone has responsibilities beyond DNN, including all of you reading this post. I am not saying this is as an excuse, its just the truth. If anyone has anything to add to this conversation, please do so but only do so if you plan on being a valid contributor and lets all avoid getting angry with one another.