Exactly one year ago, on 24 April 2018, the Joplin forum was created as a result of this post on GitHub. Before this, the only way to discuss the project was indeed on the GitHub bug tracker, which is not ideal for general discussion about features, development and so on.
After looking at various options, eventually we settled on Discourse, which provides a nice clean UI, works well on mobile, and is easy to manage. Even better, the Discourse team was kind enough to host the project for us for free, as part of their Free hosting program for open source projects. Not having to manage or pay for the server is great, and it means more time can be spent developing the application.
On the opening day, there was only three users - me, foxmask and zblesk, joined a few days later by tessus, merlinuwe, jhf2442, sciurius and many others. Today there are 811 users, 6700 posts, about 15 new posts created each day, and about 2000 pageviews each day.
The forum has been very useful to discuss features and development, to provide support and news, and to organise events such as Hacktoberfest. It also serves as a knowledge base (via the search function) to provide solutions regarding various Joplin issues.
Of course the forum has also been great to develop the community around the Joplin project, and hopefully will keep serving us well for the years to come!