From: Georg Plank <georg.plank@aon.at>

Yes, having a forum would be more confortable than having the old fashioned e-mail group.

E-mail lists are not old fashioned. They are very convenient for us who read mails off-line. Archiving and reading archives are easy with e-mail. I receive 200 Mbytes development mails per year; searching and browsing several years' archives is possible only because they are in the disk. If they were in N+1 webpages (one per list), they would be practically useless. Lets keep this e-mail list alive, but if you create a forum, here are requirements: -No street address, age, and pet name required for subscription -No registration (as in Yahoo etc.) -Forum downloadable for off-line users -Make post archives available for public (not only for members as in Yahoo etc.) -Make post archives downloadable -Make all posting downloadable with one click, make month's postings downloadable with one click (don't force people to download postings one-by-one) -Keep all posts in archives (don't delete oldest postings) -Both browse and search possibility (avoid "prev N messages" only browsing; allow people to jump to a particular month if they wish) There, e-mail lists are already looking simpler. :-) But go ahead and create the forums. I could download the archives weekly or so and read them off-line. The forums are simply bad if one wants to keep and archive the postings. By coincidence, I just came back after a few days when I started a forum download: the download program had downloaded 5.4 Gbytes(!) of the forum archives. That only because those forum servers generate bad webpages --- they re-generate IDs because they don't want support off-line users. The end effect was that a posting changed frequently its URL --- and downloader downloaded each of them, each posting was downloaded N+1 times. So, make a forum which supports off-line reading; that is, downloading. Regards, Juhana