On 26/12/19 07:48, Jeremy Utley wrote:
The problem is a web forum is not as well served to a community as a mailing list is. If you want to be a member of a community with a web forum, you have to keep going to that forum day in and day out. But with a mailing list, everything just comes into your mailbox, and you can keep up as much or little as you want. On a personal level, I agree. I much prefer a mailing list to a web forum, and I prefer the old school BBS style interfaces again, because of their speed of access - no network lag. :) But email is the best for me of the Internet based protocols.
I myself would prefer that mailing lists stay used over a web based forum! Me too, but everyone's different, and occasionally, a web forum interface can be useful, for new subscribers or people who don't keep archives of list traffic to search posts. The real problem is software developers seem to think in silos and think "email OR web". As a result, there are few packages that do both. From what I've seen, the best option is probably FUDforum, which does have the ability to link to a list server and also NNTP. Discourse, the software which the AllStarLink community is based on does have mailing list functionality, but it gets a lot of bad comments. I have enabled mailing list functionality on my account, but it's too early to tell how well it works.
A surprising option is Synchronet, which is actually an old school bulletin board system, but it has native email (including gating external lists and mailing list hosting, with its own listserv), NNTP and web support, in addition to the old school text based BBS (via telnet/SSH/rlogin) and offline interfaces. -- 73 de Tony VK3JED/VK3IRL http://vkradio.com