Hi Peter,
Seeing that the categorization package is not yet available for OpenACS.org, I still propose one forum for each main documenation area:
end users docs
admin docs
developer docs
As you know, maintaining documenation requires much effort. A continual improvement cycle can help alleviate the load on documenation writers. Users contribute to the documenation effort by posting questions and discussing topics in appropriate forums. Documenation maintainers regularly skim the forums for new content. Each forum creates a natural scope or topic boundary that matches the docs --helping to reduce the load on documentation writers. This configuration has also been requested by end-users and admins for legitimate reasons that shouldn't need to be repeated here. It's also common practice in more traditional writing environments.
To the extent that dotLRN has separately maintained documentation, equivalent forums should be dedicated to it.
There have been recent suggestions to add forums for packages. I think the benefits of package-focused forums is debatable if carried to the creation of a forum for each package --especially in context with your concern of missing important posts.
Regarding "best practices" of which roles subscribe to which forums, it seems that end-users would subscribe to the end-user forum, admins (and admin newbies) would subscribe to end-users and admins forums, and developers (and developer newbies) would subscribe to all three forums (or if busy, perhaps just developers forum).
Isn't "OpenACS Announcements" better handled by the news package implemented on OpenACS.org?
