The value of setting up weblogs and documentation as static sites has been proven now, and is beyond doubt.
How about doing the same for discussion forums?
This might be quite effective for sites which only have a few posts a day, for the same reason as blogs and docs: why waste CPU cycles on something which is going to remain frozen 99% of the time. Even GitHub-based publishing could work for low-activity forums.
Another benefit is that you wouldn’t have to do anything for sites which fizzle out and where discussion eventually stops: they can still be kept around with all interactivity gone, i.e. fully static, very lightweight, and easily picked up and mirrored by the Internet Archive, for example.
I’m deliberately not going into the technology choices here, as there are no doubt numerous ways to implement this. Just wanted to bring up the idea to find out what others think of it.
(or does something like this already exist?)
-jcw