I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life because:
- The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, stored passwords in plaintext in the database.
- The people who want to have the forum rarely have the tech skills to keep up to date on security issues, let alone keep the software up to date.
- There are 'forum as a service' sites but they inevitably become essentially ad spam platforms that are intolerable to use.
So you can do this, and I might even benefit from it showing up in google searches, but I'd actually still be way more likely to use discord if I have a question.
Also, I reject the idea that there even is a strict dichotomy between "synchronous" and "asynchronous" communication systems. If anything, you can always do what's usually described as async on a synchronous platform but you can't really do the opposite, so they're a superset/subset pair to me.
I don't care if the maintainer takes 2 days to get back to me on discord but at least if they do I get a notification and I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they have or not.