Hi Kimberly,
That is a good question. The WRF Users' Forum is something that was generated many years ago, and is supported by an outside (from NCAR) group. Over the years, the "official" WRF Support was an email-based system, in which users would submit emails to wrfhelp. We recently decided to change to a forum-based system for a couple of reasons: 1) our resources are limited and it's tough to keep up with all the emails, in addition to other job responsibilities. Having an open forum allows not only the official WRF-Support team to respond to inquiries, but for the user community to do so, as well. 2) The current email system does not allow anyone outside of the WRF-Support team to be able to search for similar inquiries. Once this new forum's database builds up, it will allow for search-ability, and will potentially help users faster, while decreasing the number of inquiries that the WRF-Support team must address, which will allow for us to place more focus on other aspects of our jobs (e.g., model development, testing, etc.).
This new forum is currently still in testing mode, but we plan to release it officially to the public (and shut down the email system) within the next few weeks. In addition to Basic WRF, it is also used for WRFDA and MPAS support.
