[alanchrishughes]

I completely agree with you about trying to simplify terminology and usage for non-techies, that is exactly why I dislike this groups concept. The irony of what you just explained about how people don’t understand forums and how they are a bad idea, is that buddypress still uses forums and the word forum itself, buddypress even goes one step further and adds another arbitrary layer of confusion called groups over top of the forums.

I agree people are more familiar with the word and concept of groups, but when they are groups of things they don’t understand, it is not helping anything. If this were my project I would start at the highest level with a “Talk” or “Discussion” or even the old “Message Board” section and then inside of that create groups to divide and organize the individual conversations/threads going on inside each group.