It works out quite nicely for us.

I love how snappy they are.

it solves all these problems decently well. i hate mailing lists, because they're not that efficient to use, and that includes the google ui to stuff (and gmail for that matter).

Sadly, I think that culture and clients are likely to sabotage this. Usenet worked pretty well when it was a handful of marquee tech firms and edus using tin or gnus. Similarly, email list work pretty well when everyone's using pine or mutt, understands threading, and uses postfix response format.

The worst mess I ever saw was a list that mixed entertainment industry types with techies, using a wide range of email clients, and featured a lot of people who really liked the sound of their own voices (talked, and wrote, far too much). It was all but impossible to follow discussions, threads were utterly mangled, etc., etc.

So I'm not sure Usenet can continue to work, on a wide scale (not to mention most people don't have a client installed). Though one can hope.

The software is just an intermediary that connects people having discussions and collaborating.

The first version may well be a web forum.

The second version may well be an email interface / mailing list.

The third version may well be native mobile apps.

But all versions work all of the time and people should be able to connect around their shared interest regardless of how their interface preference might divide them.

In that regard, you have the usenet dream of people picking whatever client they love, and there's little reason NNTP can't just be one of the available interfaces to the underlying swirl of discussion and collaboration.

Then again, to some extent I'm just nostalgic. What then was personalization I might now see as a rather low post text (signal) to metadata (noise) ratio...

I also absolutely love Futaba-style imageboards - it's a great blend of anonymity, simplicity, and community. It's a shame 4chan's reputation is what it is.

Granted, then it's no longer strictly an anonymous imageboard but in a lot of cases, the images don't add to the discussion anyway.

I disagree with getting rid of the images, though. They are a useful tool, and most forums feature some sort of attachments. attachments that add nothing to the discussion are a culture problem, not a technical one.

What's important is if there's an active community encouraging them to do something better. (This is different from just stopping them from doing bad things.)

One example off the top of my head: Because some of us would like to put it to productive use and discuss technical work-related stuff without a possibility to link it back to our employer?

I always found mailing lists a pain in the rear to be honest, because the content is usually surrounded by all this auto-generated administrative cruft in addition to the administrative interface of the mail reader itself.

I love what you're doing with Discourse but I wonder if there sin't some selection bias going here.

I bet if you asked people if there were forums they liked, you'd get a different set of responses.

Forums do seem to be generally less popular than they once were, though, probably because a lot of the functionality they used to provide has been folded into social media and blogs with social logins.. just plain forums on their own might seem a bit atavistic to someone who grew up in the age of facebook, youtube and whatever the new thing is i'm too old to even know about.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the news aggregation feature, but the community aspects are terrible. The benefit of forums was primarily in their segregation of a small-but-active community. Reddit works in precisely the opposite manner, so you end up with boring, repetitive, least-common-denominator tripe. Any subreddit small enough to avoid that is too small to be worth the time - it seems that small communities (by which I mean actual communities, as opposed to random conglomerations of people with vaguely similar tastes) tend to have other sites and methods of communication they frequent, such as this one.

I think that the poor scaling of forums is their greatest strength, and Reddit is an example of what happens when forums do scale.

Also, FWIW, I hate mailing lists (although recognise they often hold high value information).

Also, Reddit and HN are basically forums.

Quora is a forum, and I hate it.

Hacker News is a forum.

I see no reason to use JS for a simple forum like webpage just like I would see no reason to use HTML in mail.

One argument about what that I haven't seen so far in this discussion is that I can go to check the forum whenever I want (and not go for a couple of days if I decide to) whereas a mailing list is more like a push model where you receive the emails no matter what, even if you can't take care of them for a couple of days.

I have to say that I have very little experience with newsgroup though, so it might be a best of both world, but let's face it, it has becomming almost inexistant.

I think I'm a weirdo, though. Or a web-head.

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 ;-)

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.

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:

http://www.albasani.net/index.html.en http://www.eternal-september.org/

(Those are read/write, you can find many more public read-only servers)

I think it entirely depends on what the purpose of communication channel is serving.

Mailing lists are transient passive participation. I can sign up to a list and never have to do another thing because I use email all the time. Occasionally a back and forth discussion might pop up, but I can easily choose to ignore it by simply glancing at the subject line.

Forums are persistent active participation. I have to specifically access the forum, possibly logging in in the process, to see what activity has happened. Many do enable some kind of email notification with a set frequency. Digest emails lose the benefit of the quick glance decision to attend or not, while all activity would be similar to the mailing list model. As forums can encourage more silo-ed conversations or short disposable responses, getting all activity is generally not ideal, however.

My philosophy is also that 90% of what you would want to do with plugins should be built in, anyways.

In the last 3 months we went from 500 Discourse forums to 1500+. (We screen out the obvious test installs with IPs for names, etc.) We're about to take the brakes off as we get to V1.0, I have been reticient to really encourage people to launch new Discourse sites while we are in beta. But it's speeding up as we get closer. Open source FTW!

We don't have a public directory of all Discourse forums -- we do internally, since everyone pings us for versioning, but I have been hesitant about exposing it until we're clear the community is OK with a public directory.

- bbs.boingboing.net - discuss.howtogeek.com - discourse.ubuntu.com - forum.greenheartgames.com - discuss.atom.io