Do you prefer mailing lists or web based forums?

[Daniel Armstrong]

On 2/2/06, Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:37:47PM -0500, teddy mills wrote
>
> > Do you prefer mailing lists or web based forums?
>
>   Mailing lists or usenet (NNTP).  Web-based forums suck massively.

Opinion here seems to heavily favour mailing lists over web-based forums.
Why is that? The reason I ask is because I am setting up a Drupal-powered
website and plan to offer a web-based forum. I know from my personal
browsing habits that when I try out a new linux distro if the site offers
a web-based forum it is usually the first place I bookmark - the Ubuntu
Forum, for example, is a great searchable source of info that makes it
very easy to post or browse around.

Contrast that with something like the debian.user mailing list that gets
over 4000+ post a month on average. Talk about trying to take a sip of
water from a firehouse! That volume of email actually dissuades me from
subscribing.

I enjoy the TLUG mailing list, but I think beyond a handful of members
that a web-based forum offers advantages - easily searchable and posts are
indexed by search engines, and the user has more options to manage their
participation in a site. But I would like to hear from other TLUGers what
turns them off web-forums?

Why do *you* prefer mailing lists over web-based forums?

Daniel
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml