I've been shifting through the 60 or so emails I've gotten from Vassal in the past 2 days, and here's my take on this topic:
I made custom maps for Call of Duty for over three years, and similar to Vassal, there was a huge online community involved in COD map making. Vassal is a gaming community, no matter how you look at it. Just like the COD community, it is a group of people all designing and playing the same game. And in order to keep a gaming community efficient, you've got to keep it organized. There were a handful of solid COD mapping forums that were broken down into the same basic categories: News, Tutorials, and New releases. If you were looking for a new map to download or play, you knew exactly where to look. If you had a question about how to do something, you knew exactly where to look. If you had a question, you knew who and where to ask. This is what Vassal needs. Vassal, though it appears basic, is a very detailed program, and there is a lot to learn that is simply not covered in the provided tutorials. And, with the absensce of a forum, it's very difficult to ask questions or look at old answers to learn the program. A forum is a solid place to ask and answer questions, and leave those questions and answers for future people to read. A tutorial section is great, expecially when people volunteer to write tutorials on basic concepts in Vassal. The COD community was one of the most successful and efficient communities out there, and forums made that possible. Unless Vassal is trying to maintain the low profile that it has, it needs forums to get an active member base. Of course, I have no answer to the problem of finding a forum to use, so that is of course an issue...
