I came to the conclusion that forums (or fora) are not a good way to provide customer support. They are perhaps a good way to engage the community, but not to provide support. Put it simply, they lack proper team features. You keep seeing threads as new even if someone else on your team has already responded.
In the end, it’s a giant waste of time, not only because you have to mark as “read” several threads without even bother to read them, but also because it becomes extremely hard to find existing questions and answers.
A Stack Exchange approach would be good I guess, and there are open source projects that already use Stack Overflow as their only Q/A place. Sure, there are no “general” or “off-topic” discussions, but that’s a pro, not a con. It’s the only way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio.
Spam is another huge problem. We are seeing few automated spam lately, but more elaborate, human-driven messages containing just enough unique content to instill in you the doubt that the post is legit and that it’s simply a clueless individual who posted it. Well, it turns out it’s not the case. I mean, we get dozen of such messages each week, I just can’t believe humanity has gotten so bad in so few time.