Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-168424-20130114045853/@comment-4674838-20130114061412

Fandyllic wrote: It seems to have a strange restriction of existing articles (from main namespace?), but since Community doesn't allow creating new articles in the main namespace, it severely restricts the usable Topics. Yes, forum topics are currently limited to pages in the main namespace. Here on Central, that unfortunately means that users cannot create new topics since the main namespace is locked, instead the process outlined at Community Central:Forum Topics is used (which is linked to from the forum introduction at Special:Forum).

Allowing topics to come from other namespaces besides the main namespace has been brought to the attention of staff and BertH in particular thought it would be a great idea. Hopefully this suggestion is taken seriously and implemented in the future.

The main benefit of topics (as I see it) is organizational: it gives the ability to browse forum threads by topic. For example, Topic:JavaScript lists threads here in the Central forums which are related to JavaScript.