Feel free to kick this back if it's not too thrilling, but there are some larger chunks of product work which could get Ponder to a more promising state if you're interested. You can pick-and-choose here if some of this is stuff you want to do and other parts aren't.

Ponder isn't a great application right now, but I want to go through another couple of iterations on it before we give up on it. Here are the major issues I see with it, roughly in order of importance, and my proposed fixes:

No Herald Integration: T6919. We have Ponder disabled here in the upstream because there's no way to keep track of when users ask questions. This lead to things not getting touched for a long time. Herald integration won't solve this problem completely, but would solve it in the upstream case by allowing us to receive email notifications when new questions are asked. This would let us re-enable Ponder in the upstream and at least get it off the path toward deletion.

Remove Voting: T6920. Ponder features voting, which makes sense for a large, public site like StackOverflow or Quora where many thousands of users might read a question and the userbase is the general public. Most Phabricator installs have a small number of users, and voting does not create a useful signal at small scales. We can provide better mechanisms for solving the problems voting solves, without cluttering the UI and codebase.

Support Merging: T6921. There's no way to close a question as a duplicate of another question, but there should be, similar to Maniphest.

There's probably still a lot of work after that, but I think fixing that stuff might be enough to make the application not feel like a total dead end.

gah