Please get in contact with Matt Haughey, he's the best possible person to talk to about this, having run Metafilter for over a decade. Be warned, he's going to

Please get in contact with Matt Haughey, he's the best possible person to talk to about this, having run Metafilter for over a decade. Be warned, he's going to strongly advise you to set up a backchannel for public metadiscussion. Jeff Atwood resisted it vehemently at first when another metafilter moderator was a guest on his podcast, but they did eventually set up their meta subsite in the same vein.