Hello All, 

I hope I didn't get off on the wrong foot with you guys with my first 
post, :-( .   I  have read all your thoughtful comments to date and you 
have some good points.  

Bill Jonas got the first lick in and said what a lot of you apparently 
feel, the e-mail list method is good enough.  He also has a good point 
about "in-your-face" delivery and having to actually go to the effort of 
a login to a forum.  However, every forum site I've seen will allow you 
to be notified of activity at whatever level you wish to subscribe to - 
with a hyperlink to the new post or changed section - which you can then 
read without logging in, unless you wish to reply.

I'll also grant you that the subscriber base here is rather small,  
perhaps there wouldn't be the traffic necessary to sustain a thriving 
forum based community.  It seems to me that if folks will wade through 
these e-mails then they would happily replace that effort with a simple 
login and the ability to selectively browse threads, threads which would 
have a bit more persistence than these.  Sometimes I don't login to my 
favorite site, www.extremetech.com, for several days but I know I can 
catch up whenever I want to and will be able to easily follow the 
discussions.

I guess it is the visually unappealing style of the e-mails that bothers 
me most and a close second would be the fact that you cannot see the 
whole thread as effectively as with a forum. 

It makes my head hurt just looking at the messages with all the 
"baggage" of the reply-to e-mail, which usually already contains 2 other 
previously copied  posts, just so that you can keep the thread intact; 
not to mention all the sigs and pgp keys and weird carriage returns etc 
etc...  (no offense intended, but they are visual annoyances, at least 
to me).  There's a lot of clutter to sift through to get to the payload.

Probably I am just a whiny b*st*rd (who, by the way, has no web skills 
to implement a forum on his own :-[                             ) that 
should have kept his gub shut.  I'll now go back to "lurker" mode... 
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