The Forums Council is set to expire on February 2/202o. As there is no Community Council, who own the Forum Council Team, how do we get renewed.
The Forum Council Team looks after the running the Forums, appointing staff members, helping member solve problems with their accounts. To do this we need access to the vBulletin software that the Forum runs on.
The Community Council owns the Forum Council team, even though they aren’t directly a member (you can see this on https://launchpad.net/~forum-council), so they can appoint themselves as an administrator and renew members for you.
@cjwatson, sorry but that misses the point. The Community Council are owners of the Forum Council Team because one of their functions was to oversee the Forum Council, and while there was a functioning Community Council they were able to renew us as necessary, but there is no functioning Community Council now.
The Forum Council Team membership of every single forum admin (Forum Council member) is due to expire on 1st February. There is no one - apart from Mark Shuttleworth - who can “appoint themselves as an administrator” of the functionally defunct Community Council.
Oops, sorry. That last sentence should have read:
There is no one - apart from Mark Shuttleworth - who can “appoint themselves as an administrator” of the Forum Council Team.
It would also be possible to ask Canonical’s sysadmins to do it; they have privileged access to Launchpad. You could email rt@ubuntu.com.
So what happens on the 2nd of February for the Forums, if the Community Council doesn’t appoint/extend the Forum Council Team members?
The expiry date has been renewed, but I do think no risk should be taken. Perhaps Ubuntu Forums could be discontinued and a new Forum could be created. Also, since it might be designed from ground-to-up, the UI would be better 
There is no need to have a forum. We have Ask Ubuntu if you have any questions.
So a new unofficial forum? Another official forum wouldn’t solve the problem that this thread relates to. There are plenty of existing (Linux) forums that will answer questions from Ubuntu users.
New users to Ubuntu seem to like forums whatever their format. Not everyone likes the Ask Ubuntu format. We’ve all been new users to some software project or application and forums of whatever format need to respect that by providing support to users whatever their level of expertise.
Although I no longer post to the Ubuntu Forums I do hope that they continue for as long as members of the Forums Council are willing to serve.
@rs2009, on a day to day basis the existing forums are run by the Forum Council with help from a small team of Super Moderators and Moderators.
Canonical IS are only involved with respect to the domain name and hosting of the forums software.
I’m sorry but I don’t see why you are calling for a change. I doubt many of those on the the Forum Council would want to get involved in setting up new forums and deal with both the technical and financial aspects of proceeding in that direction.
For me the only issue is that the lack of a Community Council that can delegate authority to sub-councils and boards such as the Forums Council and the Ubuntu Membership Board.