Mailing list interactions are also an issue, but I think having some outlet for the infosec tangents which naturally comes with discussing Qubes could bring surprise benefits to the project, of course assuming a certain level of quality is reached in terms of both communication skills and critical thinking.
This is why I’m now humbly proposing nuking the current subforum and its users (‘humbly’ and ‘nuking’ don’t really belong together, but oh well), ending the use of Discourse’s Lounge template on which the current forum is based, which is based around Discourse’s automated level system, and switching to manually vetting who to let into the subforum (once a certain level of participation has been reached) once a quarter. Steps must be taken, though, to ensure we don’t end up with some sort of echo chamber.
I don’t think this is as much work as it sounds, as few have reached Level 3 this year, and it doesn’t seem like we’ll have a deluge of Level 3s in the foreseeable future.