As you may know, our old system before the merger with stackexchange had a meta discussion board which is now called 'tea', and it still exists: http://mathoverflow.tqft.net/. There is a brief and easy ritual for registration. A lot of people (including me) don't like the 'points' aspect of meta (even though, as Emil notes, they don't actually add or subtract reputation). I personally find them a distraction, and they have secondary effects. Moreover, I find the question and answer format somewhat clunky on occasion, especially in cases where one doesn't have a question or an official answer *per se*, but would just like to raise points for discussion (a frequent result is that discussions get carried out in comment boxes with their 600 character limit, which itself can be an annoyance). You might *try* posting a 'question' here, and when you feel that any of these aspects are too bothersome, announce that you want to continue the discussion in tea. A trouble is that probably not many will follow you there. (Or you could even just post there without an announcement, but likely just <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=*crickets%20chirp*">hear the crickets chirp</a>.) My own reaction, for what it's worth, has been to simply make my peace with the new meta set-up. We are probably the only SE site with *two* discussion boards. My understanding was that keeping the old one was part of the deal with the merger.