Does the Discourse platform allow Elastic to create custom fields that are required as part of creating a new topic? The initial response to a new topic is usually something along the lines of "What is your Logstash version?", "What is your Beats version?". If custom fields are available in Discourse, they can be made required fields to create a new topic and there would be no need to ask users what version they are running. One less question to ask would translate to more efficiently addressing the issue.
Thanks for raising this, we appreciate any feedback we get on these forums 
We can setup "templates" for new threads so that we prompt users to provide this information, so I'll raise an internal task to look at that.
I'm not sure forcing users to include this info is a positive thing, as it may stop people from posting altogether.
Thanks Mark