Simplify3D is a large and complex piece of software. Many people are using it and, more to the point, many people are requesting features and reporting bugs (together called 'issues'). So I think Simplify3D deserves a dedicated issue tracking system. It would streamline the process and would surely make life easier for everyone involved. It also communicates to the users that you take their problems and suggestions seriously, and that nothing will fall through the cracks.
There are some things a phpBB forum simply doesn't support, like:
- marking and filtering issues by status (open, accepted, in progress, done, obsolete, not fixing, duplicate),
- having people vote on issues and sorting issues by number of votes,
- automatically detecting possible duplicates of new issues.
There are many internal advantages for the development team too, but my main point is that it would improve communication between developers and users.
And there are plenty of choices. I myself prefer YouTrack (by Jetbrains), but it's quite complex and would probably be overkill. Something simple like the GitHub issue tracker would already be an enormous improvement.
Just my 2¢.
