Please, let's limit this thread to only discussing the possibility of switching off Canny and using hashtags instead,

Mark; May I be so bold as to offer a few suggestions about this?

Insofar as any consensus has emerged it would appear to be for a single forum for the “development” of Groups.io. I can see why that in at least some circumstances you might wish or need to distinguish between Basic and Premium / Enterprise Owners but for the moment I am going to assume that you might be able to achieve this from the email addresses of the members of a Development Group; for the moment I will assume that this group will be beta in an ongoing form.

I think there are clear benefits to be had from changing the way Hashtags can be used on beta, perhaps to the point where every New Topic has to have at least one hashtag in its subject. However, I think there are major drawbacks to the way hashtags currently operate on beta, and I would suggest the following change.

Subscribers should only be able to Use Existing Hashtags. When I started putting this together 3 days ago there were 141 hashtags, which IMHO is simply silly. Now there are 146. Some are clearly near – duplicates of others; others have no obvious meaning and so on. (Some of the duplicates are the result of members misspelling something or using a plural where a singular already existed… or vice versa.) I submit that hashtags could and would be more effective if the list was drastically culled so that subscribers had a list of perhaps a couple of dozen to choose from; hashtags need only be high – level indicators of the subject area – they do not need to dig down into the weeds to pinpoint some precise area of Groups.io operation; if that were the case then every checkbox (etc) would need to have an associated hashtag that had to accompany a topic about it, and that would be absurd. If it were to be found that there was a clear omission from the list of hashtags then it would be the work of seconds to plug the gap, but users would not be able to do it. In addition, as you have already suggested there could be a number of Moderator Only “progress” hashtags that can be retrospectively added to a subject to show its status, ranging from perhaps #SorryButNo to #Done; I think this would be seriously beneficial.

I could continue with further suggestions the above is quite enough for now.

Chris