Hey all, I want to write a longer response to this and will elaborate on some points later… but I’ve got a full-time job on top of my work for Discourse…
The community feedback has really been integral the the changes and improvements made. As far as an “official design challenge”… make a post here. Create mock-ups, provide reasoning, draw something on a napkin. I can promise you that we’ll look at it. It might not be today, it might be a week from now.
A lot of the changes over the past year with Discourse have been driven by posts here. There’s been a lot of productive debate within threads. The fact that Discourse is being used by thousands of people every day is research and user testing — it’s more robust than a lot of research and testing that I’ve seen corporations pay agencies tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands of dollars for.
Have to run… more to come!