tagboard or zonkboard might work, but i suspect you'd get more social chitchat than relevant convo there. plus those are remotely hosted, and tend to go down a lot.

by the way, it would be GREAT if someone a lot smarter than me could develop a tagboard plugin for MT, so it wouldnt be remotely hosted. you can make a bogus one tinkering with mt's comment feature a little, but that's kind of a taped-together approach.

This would also be helpful in putting together FAQs for our scripts, etc.

But I'm really clueless on the whole thing. hehe. I don't know of anything small, although I bet a simple system wouldn't be too hard to write in PHP!

I didn't want to do the PHP board because I don't want something that elaborate. I do want "threads" so that if there's a specific question - there may be some back and forth on it - but I really only want two main "forums" - (each forum would have "threads" under them)

So I'm picturing a main forum:
General Questions
and under that people post questions if they have questions that don't relate to any specific posts on the blog..(called topics on php board). The replies go under the question "topic". That way if you have the same question you can follow along with the replies…

If you do go with a board, how about something like the PHP board we are using at Blogomania? I've been really happy with that - but you would know how hard it was to set up!

My final thought is a comment form that sends an e-mail to all of us and then we can collaborate from there. That way the visitors stay focused on the site while we work in the background.