I suggested the introduction of a dedicated discourse instance for users in What I miss here coming from users.rust-lang.org because I think gearing a forum towards users would make it more welcoming for users. When it comes to welcomeness towards users, I think we have to distinguish between two factors:
- how welcoming the community is (e.g. are the people welcoming?, is there appropriate moderation?)
- how welcoming the infrastructure is (e.g. what forum categories are there? for what/whom are they designated?)
As far as I can tell this forum is doing a great job when it comes to the first point but only a mediocre job when it comes to the second point. There are 8 categories targeted primarily at developers but only a single category targeted at users. If you are a user with interests other than Q&A, you are just out of luck. While some categories sound interesting for users they aren’t actually welcome there, case in point:
Editor/IDE Integration
Discussion place for integrators of Python support into editors and IDEs (not meant for general users).
Creating a dedicated forum for users would allow the introduction of further categories targeted at users. The exchange between users and developers (as well as between beginners and experts) is of course very important, but it does not necessitate having everything in a single forum. Case in point users.rust-lang.org where the quality of help provided by volunteers (some of which are very much experts) is incredible.
There could be dedicated categories in users.python.org to foster the exchange between users and developers (e.g. the current Idea category) and perhaps a Surveys category that developers can use if they want to gather feedback from users.