I feel like two unlocking features would be to allow “staged” users and “group” personal chat.
Bringing them in as full forum members would require term-of-service, sign up and so on. But “staged” users don’t need any of that cause they are not real users on the forum.
So the flow, could be:
- Stage a user
- Discuss stuff in an “isolated” way with staged user in a 1-on-1 basis with #support-the-product group.
- At the end of the conversation…
- Was this helpful… why not join our community at …
- User joins community
- User can see the 1-on-1 discussion with the group.
Bringing staged users to a Support channel that is available to all site users would be a recipe for disaster imo. Hugh spam vector. At least in the Support group you mitigate by only allowing a small subset of users access and you shield spammers from other spammers.