Has the Stack Overflow crew considered partnering with other existing, more traditional forums to support open ended discussion?
I understand Stack Overflow is strictly a Q&A site. We all know the drill. We also all know that when a more 'discussion-y' question is asked it's either coerced into Community Wiki mode or out right closed by the moderators. And that's fair enough I suppose but sometimes a question is open ended or spawns many, many comments. With Stack Overflow's lack of threads it can be difficult to follow anything of length. So, on to the my feature request!
Partner with other forums such as Reddit (stackoverflow.reddit.com?) so if open discussion is wanted it can happen easily. And by easily I mean provide a link on each question page saying something like "Open an official discussion at $forum_name", or if the discussion was already opened then "Join the official discussion at $forum_name". And of course on the forum posts provide a link back to the SO question for reference. When clicking the outgoing link a bunch of heavy lifting is automatically taken care of such as signing into the forum (As who? Obviously that will have to be figured out) and filling in the various post fields with data from the question and submitting it.
As to which forums would be official partners I only came up with Slashdot and Reddit as possible candidates but I imagine that there should be a number to choose from depending on the topic of the question. Select the best forum for the topic.
The key part is to still let SO be really good at Q&A and still let the various forums be really good at being forums while providing a little bit of official integration between the two. Additionally if the discussion devolves into nothing worth while then it's only related to SO and not actually a part of it. No harm, no foul.
So at the risk of making this sound too 'discussion-y', what do you people think? ;)
PS, And on second thought maybe this would be better implemented as a browser plugin or Greasemonkey script. :P
PPS, Or perhaps the focus should be a little narrower. One of the options for closing a question could be to migrate it to a forum area. That way the Q&A isn't polluted with discussion questions and the actually discussion could be isolated to a discussion area.