Someone asked recently about a list of features in Discourse. Well, I was having a discussion with someone else about Discourse and the forum FAQ came up.
Who exactly is going to read this? Tell me, who do you know that reads the usage guide for Halo before putting the disc in their Xbox?
(You’ll note that the “manual” for most games is that the first level is a de-facto tutorial. That’s the correct model here.)
Let’s focus on making the software easy to understand by using it, not writing a bunch of stuff that nobody’s gonna read. Trust me, the type of users you’d desperately want to read this are exactly the ones that never will. And the types of users that do read it are the ones who don’t need to.
I totally agree a Usage Guide is not that helpful, but what I do find helpful is contextual help, especially for the back end (which I have yet to look at! - perhaps it is there already). No doubt there are tons of options, and having a bit of verbiage about some of them would likely be helpful.
A link to a page or two of introduction to the front end would be helpful to users as well, perhaps highlighting some of the key differences from the old fashioned forums.
button is able to do, what 
means, and yes - how to create a topic.
