The news discussion forum is gone due to the technical difficulty of integrating AfterDawn's site platform with the new XenForo forum platform. Comments on the news are connected solely to your AfterDawn.com account, which is no longer linked to your forum account. @Ketola may wish to confirm, or if you have further questions regarding it
I can confirm the Ripper's analysis. It was next to impossible -- without major hacks -- to implement our news forums with xenForo as it was done with our own forum software. Thus, now the news comments are just that, comments visible underneath the news, but not available here. The news comments are actually still running on our old forum structure and most likely will remain to do so. The old forum engine just nowadays consists only the news comments and nothing else
While we're on the topic of news, it may well be worthwhile adding a 'News' link to the top navigation bar within the forum - say between Home and Forums.
I see some benefit in it, but not much -- I've heard quite a lot of bad about Disqus, it being slow, site not owning its own comments, etc. On plus side, single-sign-on with FB/G+/Twitter are tempting.. I'd say we wont do much about the current layout until we get the main site major restructuring done and actually know how "v5" AfterDawn will look like -- and then adopt that layout to the forums too.
I don't know too much about it from a non-user side; just curious really. If opening up comment-without-signup on the current platform is a possibility though that would probably be beneficial. Yep fair enough.
