Discourse allows us to set up email integrations where even people who don’t join the forum can email us, it sets up a PM with the group(s) where we orient the incoming email address(es). That makes it easier for everyone in the group to track the discussion, and we can “whisper” to have private discussion within it, unseen by the outside contact.
This has some overlap with features in CiviCRM. Overall, Discourse is more flexible and quality tool for these purposes though (and anyway, I recall there was some effort toward integrating Civi and Discourse from @Salt ).
So, I see lots of ways this could be used well. Thoughts?