Its true at times SO goes into "crazy mode" and closes useful questions and downvotes good answer, its a known condition as "human condition" , but overall SO is very useful for getting answer to questions and definitely is good promotion of pharo.
Please note also that a question can be turned into wiki which also useful. I closely follow SO pharo tag and I track this tag and smalltalk tag and I am notified for any new questions using these tags. Surprising the majority of smalltalk questions are pharo questions which is very nice indeed. I dont know how much work would be if the pharo website would offer an online forum. If pharo grows in popularity I am not a fan of managing my messages via a mailing list. Blender which has already an extremely popular forum here (with at least 1 million posts) http://blenderartists.org/forum/ , has also chose to move to Stack exchance and has its own domain there for questions about blender. Emacs also recently ported to stack exchange. So Stack Exchange is here to stay and will all its disadvantages still a very good deal for pharo. Stack exchange, with Stackoverflow a part of it, is actually huge and probably the most popular ? forum ? out there and it keeps growing.
