This site already has a fair level of integration with Muff Wiggler, and to be honest I think that Muff's has already established itself as the de facto website for modular synth discussion.
No doubt about that. And the MG forum is not meant to replace Muff, which would be a ridiculous and hopeless effort anyway.
MG already had a kind of basic forum functionality for a while with the discussion/comment section where you could comment on unique modules/racks/patches, so the idea behind the forum isn't exactly new.
The context sensitive discussion made absolutely sense but the implementation wasn't as good as I liked.
The new forum engine just tries to expand this functionality by adding a search function and a more common thread hierarchy and the possibility to add threads which are not bound to modules/racks/patches.
In my view this is evolution not revolution.
The goal is to merge discussions into the forum in a way 90% of MG users won't even notice while given the other 10% who care better tools to use.
Unfortunately I rushed the launch so the migration isn't ready yet (what bugs me).
I mean sure this new forum "doesn't look like an Excel® Spreadsheet" (personally I like the vBulletin look), but I really don't see anything here that Muff's doesn't already offer.
In short, making multiple general-purpose modular synth forums is kind of like making multiple modular databases; different distributions of people can yield different results. This can be a good thing, but I think the community around modulars is small enough as is.
When I started MG 3 years ago a lot people told me there is no reason to do it, because of the already established options available. If I had listen to them what would have happened?
Probably nothing!
People would still happily use their JAVA planners just because others told them that's the way to do it.
And most would accept that and wouldn't care about it at all.
I just try to improve things. This doesn't work in 80% of all times, and I never now if it will work or not.
I am sure that somewhere a kid is building the next Über-Planner, not because it makes sense, but because he wants to do it.
Beep, Bopp, Bleep: info@modulargrid.net