@Even:

Thanks for reopening this. Yes, customers are asking questions directly in the public forum in addition to using the "Contact Us". I should also note that we want them to be able to ask questions in the public forum!

We have forums for our other (unrelated) products and they are a very valuable way to provide community support and for the community to interact with one another. It also builds up a public knowledge base (if the forum is public like we would want) and begins appearing in search results for others to find solutions to obscure problems that might not warrant a full knowledgebase article.

It is very common to have discussion forums for products like this, and I think stackoverflow.com, stackexchange, and even the FogBugz support site http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/support/ are all testaments to the benefits of the ability to ask questions or add comments in a forum.

Also, it is worth noting that the existing idea-only forum feature is *so close* to having a great discussion forum like this. A simple change to allow our visitor/user to add a post as a "question" or "comment" *or* an "idea" would be perfect. Alternatively, if we could have one forum for "ideas" and another one for "discussions" it would be great. If we could this one tiny change it would add a tremendous amount of value to our UserVoice helpdesk!

Since we're already paying $500 per admin per month, we will not be able to justify adding another system to get a complete helpdesk. I'm sure at this price, I can get one system to deal with "ideas" as well as "discussions" or "questions" in forums.

It is disappointing you declined this. People tend to report bugs and ask questions in the "Forum" as UserVoice calls them, and they end up showing up as "ideas" which I don't think is "straight-forward" for anyone.
UserVoice is handling this scenario very poorly for us. It seems we need to either get UserVoice to add some ability to make some forum topics as "discussions" or "questions" instead of ideas or look at yet-another-tool to help us actually run a community helpdesk.

Great. Glad this is coming because our customers are complaining. About when can we expect it?

I would very much like to be able to "forward" a ticket response from a customer (with recent correspondance history) to a development team so they can get back to us and help us respond to the customer accurately. And of course, I'd like the development team's reply to be recorded in uservoice for future reference. So a "forward" button that allows me to enter an arbitrary address that behaves much like the reply functionality that already exists in UV would be perfect.