With gmail, I have all those features - I visit a few forums and so far I'm not convinced they are better in any significant way. The biggest killer for me is search. Find a forum - ANY forum - and do a search. It takes forever. In Gmail it's nearly instantaneous, and much MUCH smarter (search is a very hard problem - look up Lucene for some of the challenges) - so far I have not yet seen a forum search that works as well. Searching forums with Google is just painful. Email, with appropriate tagging, filtering, etc is much more customizable and usable for me. Also I end up with a full archive - if the forum or mail server go down I still have access to the archive, and I find that with fast search most problems I have with a PIC can be dealt with very quickly simply by searching the archive. Further, there are piclist reflector forums, IIRC. If you don't like them, build your own - the software is out there. Furthermore, unless you've run a forum with a heavy load before you have NO idea the load a moderate sized forum puts on a server. A forum with 200 active users, and 100-200 posts a day requires at minimum it's own beefy VPS, but is still slow unless you move to a $100/mo + dedicated hosting. That's without all the bells and whistles people will undoubtedly ask for (RSS feeds, email notification, etc). And then the real fun begins as you have to constantly keep up with the patches to the OS, webserver (unless you pay more for managed hosting on a dedicated server or VPS), and the forum software (which the hosting company will NOT touch unless you pay more for a dedicated, managed, forum company). The last time I look at the bandwidth requirements of the piclist about 6+ years ago, the server is sending out 40GBytes per month of email. Plain text email. (about 20MB per user per month). Now, let's say that only 10% of the list would check the forum on a regular (daily) basis, and that 1% would check it a few times a say (unlike email, forums require active checking - with email I get a nice notification every 10 or 20 (configurable) minutes summarizing recently updated topics). Further, instead of serving a 1k message, the forum serves 10x (in a spartan configuration) and up to 1,000x as much data (because you're not just sending one email once to a user, you're sending the entire 25 current topics on the front page, and when they click through they get the first 25 emails... each time they click through.) Even with fewer users actively checking the forum daily you're looking at around a terabyte of transfer per month. This ends up being about $200 [USD] per month, plus perhaps 10 hours a month blocking spammers, attackers, and keeping the software up to date. Of course, you aren't volunteering to pay for this, so then we get to have a discussion about who 'owns' or 'sponsers' the setup, and then on to the advertising model that will need to be used. and on, and on, and on. Trust me. Let sleeping dogs lie. There is nothing wrong with the list as-is. Everything you've asked for can be built around your own email client. There would be tremendous friction in such a shift. If you really, seriously think that there's a significant interest in such a forum, start one up. It'll start out small, inexpensive, and manageable, and it'll grow according to interest. It'll take a few years before it's really popular, but if you model it after the piclist in terms of quality and content, then you may get what you're after. Keep in mind that a certain percentage of really good engineers will not move, and even those that sign up simply won't take the time to click through a forum to find out if a topic is interesting enough to comment on. -Adam On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Nathan House wrote: > Don't get me wrong, I love the PIC List and have gotten a lot of great > advice on here, but wouldn't a forum be much easier to use? > > > > Think about it, all posts would be displayed as easy to read "threads" on > the forum, no bounced emails (I have this problem for some reason), easy > search capability (and a lot faster than the archive), etc.. > > > > It seems to me like it would be advantageous to hold these discussions on a > forum! > > > Nathan > > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist