At the moment, the plan in motion is to make it possible to reply to a review directly in the exchange. But this functionality is not planned for a lengthy discussion of course but allows to redirect anywhere we want (or not engage at all).
The idea with mapping all packages with the forum threads makes me ask a lot of questions, the first being that not everyone who uses the Exchange and look into the reviews and ratings are part of the Forum. Another is creating a lot of topics on the packages that have no reviews at all. Especially as the number of packages keeps growing.
I would suggest to have a call to discuss how you see it so I could later discuss in more details with the team what could and what could not be feasible. What do you think, @thl-cmk@r.sander@andreas-doehler ?
I wouldn’t just create blank forum threads. I think the simplest solution would be to rather just create a “discuss” link to a template post in the Exchange category. The template post includes the forum handle and the title and a label.
We could then just list existing posts based on label in the Exchange.
Much simpler to implement and I think there is enough justification for the forum to be the one place to discuss things like plug-ins etc.
That way we don’t have to just rebuild a discussion function in the custom built Exchange and can rather have the development resources work on a Git/GitHub integration for the Exchange. This creates much more value.