Hmm, this looks interesting!
So here's my perspective on this. I think this is a great idea, and personally I know a few people who I'd band with to make a coding "guild" of sorts.
However, there's only one thing I'm sort of puzzled about - why SMF/forums? Typically, I (and other "groups/guilds") would be making a blog of sorts to announce any progress or ideas from the group itself. Personally, that's something that I would be aiming for, but other "groups/guilds" that do this include places like
Popehat (a group of lawyer folk),
CodingHorror (a programming blog),
Linux Mint's Dev blog (a development blog for the Linux Mint OS), and even professionally, the
NYTimes Open Code Blog (a professional blog about web/backend dev for NYTimes). IMO, a forum isn't necessarily the best platform for a group of sorts.
If a group desires to interact with the community, often they will seek to find a home in a larger community. A well known example is
NSIS (installation framework for Windows), which houses their community in the
Winamp forums, since a good portion of their modding/plugin community live there.
Now, as a counterpoint to what I said before, there are communities that are built around software. Gaming is a big example - big AAA companies like Bethesda Softworks have their
own forums dedicated to Skyrim, EA has their
own forum, and anybody who has used Steam knows that each game has its own discussion groups, too. Forums definitely work great for soliciting feedback, especially for major companies.
For me (and the potential group), a blog will simply suffice. Indie game devs, hardware hackers, and even
Ndless like using a blog for displaying progress, as well as soliciting feedback and support. If we really need a forum of sorts, I may go with something like
Discourse (or even
Vanilla Forums), light discussion board software that I've often seen used in many kinds of communities.
For you guys, maybe a forum will work. The only thing is that with CodingWalrus, I would expect that the forum will only have discussion on the software being developed by CodingWalrus - offtopic/general discussion is unlikely to occur there due to the nature of the site. If that's what you guys want, that's great - and hey, it might become something big!
Regardless, it's all up to you guys - I've voiced my opinion here. Either way, you guys will have my full support. Less than 6 hours left at the time of writing - good luck with the launch!
