I have a question to all those of you who wrote/will write/think that they prefer forums to mailing lists - I've just picked you randomly to reply to as I don't want to spam the thread with the same question:
Which mail client do you use, and have you ever used a mail client that supports an easily accessible threaded view, like mutt? Or have you ever used a Usenet news reader, like slrn?
I really don't like web forums and very much prefer mailing lists and NNTP, because it gives me a unified interface for all the different lists and newsgroups with very low UI latencies and powerful functionality for dealing efficiently with huge discussions.
That's why my hypothesis is that many people who prefer forums do so because they have never seen/used a good/powerful mail or news reader, and only ever have used mailing lists through some webmail interface - which indeed probably is a lot worse than web forums, especially if it's high volume. So, I am asking you to provide some data to check this hypothesis against ;-)
Like one of the posters above mentioned, forums have multiple subsections. As an example let's say the forum is about animation, I can read Japanese animation section and ignore the Spanish animation section. With a mailing list it's all or nothing.
4chan is a forum, neogaf is a forum, gamedev.net is a forum. I think they all work much better as a forum than a mailing list.
I think mailing lists serve a different need/style/purpose than forums.
What dfc said, but other than that I think that is more an argument for usenet than for web forums? At least the "subscribe" step tends to be better integrated with newsreaders than with MUAs, so it's easier to subscribe to a whole bunch of groups. But on the other hand, subscription tends to be only a small part of the overall experience, so I am not so sure it really matters all that much.
How is that different than being subscribed to [email protected] and not subscribing to [email protected]? Or subscribing to [email protected] and and not subscribing to debian-devel-french or debian-devel-portugese?
For one it's easier to browse without committing. If there happens to be no new topics in Japanese Animation I might read Spanish Animation and if I want, reply to a topic. With N mailing lists I have to commit to the entire list rather than just individual topics in subforums. In other words I have to subscribe to the "Spanish Animation" list rather that just one topic inside.
Yes, I have tried such clients. I'd say NNTP > forums > mailing lists, because I don't want to spend time writing inbox filters or the like. Email is for a very different purpose than forums, and I like having separate accounts for both. (NNTP, meanwhile, is dead - I'd have to pay for access, and the communities just aren't there any more).
Yeah, the filtering setup indeed is more complicated than necessary, I guess a more streamlined process for that would be nice (the whole aubscription process, that is, like some URI scheme that would invoke a "subscribe to mailing list" function of your MUA, which would initiate the subscription, set up the filter, configure the list address as a subscribed mailinig list (for Mail-Followup-To handling)?).
On the other hand, once you have one filter setup, it usually isn't that difficult to copy and modify it for a new list!? And signup is a one-time thing, after all. But two-click subscribe certainly would be nice and shouldn't really be all that difficult to do.
(Edit - sorry, forgot the second part of my answer, so here it is:)
Usenet is not dead, though quite a bit less alive than it once was ;-) - but no, you don't have to pay, there are a few free news servers, if you can live without the binary groups, for example:
I believe that eternal-september.org provides free access to newsgroups. As for the communities, it really depends on the newsgroup. Some of them are still relatively active.
I use Thunderbird as both my mail and news client. It has a threaded view and adequate filter/killfile capability (though not as sophisticated as some other newsreaders that use a score based system).
I think I'm a weirdo, though. Or a web-head.