I realised this morning that it’s common usage among those of us who have watched this forum develop to refer to it as “Discourse”. However, that’s not mentioned anywhere obvious on the page. As a result, I was busy telling newcomers to sign up to Discourse, and they had no clue what I was talking about.
I mention this here just as a warning to others, but perhaps we should consider adding a “(by the way, this is Discourse)” note to the page if we’re going to continue using this terminology.
I’d actually strongly prefer we not call it Discourse at all as that’s the technology platform, not the site.
There are thousands of Discourse sites out there around the world, and ours is called community.lsst.org. I wasn’t here when the URL was branded and I don’t entirely like how long it is, but this is what we have (at least for now).
You can call it The Community if you like informally, or LSST Community. I try to call it community.lsst.org when I give talks about it.
Maybe we should start calling it “the forum” or “the LSST forum” or something? I think I agree we want to keep the name implementation-independent, but calling it “the community” could get confusing w.r.t. the actual community of people involved and interested in LSST (and “community.lsst.org” is a lot of syllables).
I agree. As I said, I didn’t choose the domain, and the domain should be tied into the name/branding. I think we still have a chance to rebrand it, though, before it’s launched widely.
I’m a bit worried about the term “forum”; I think it brings a bunch of connotations and perhaps baggage. I do like “community”, although I acknowledge it is sesquipedalian, as it really is intended to be a home for that “actual community of people involved and interested in LSST”.
The thesaurus doesn’t suggest much: “colloquy”, “agora”, “parley”
Some people call their Discourse installation’s talk.mydomain.tld or discuss.mydomain.tld or connect.mydomain.tld. I’m with @ktl that ‘Forum’ has a lot of baggage 
“talk” seems too informal. “discuss” isn’t bad, but some things aren’t really for discussion, and for others we’d perhaps like to emphasize conclusions rather than discussions :). “connect” could be OK.
What if we borrow from the stack overflow world and call it the “LSST exchange”?
There’s also the good-old gam; less pretentious than agora.
But I’d go with Simon’s “exchange” proposal.