It's awful! And I agree with the other commenters that it used to be better. Usenet was better. A threaded mail client is better. HN is better. Reddit is better!
This got me thinking: why don't folks just deploy a reddit instance? It's open source, it's easy to hack, it works. I went ahead and did it myself. As a test, I wrote a little gateway program to import all the postings from that famous old Usenet dump [1], the one Google was so excited to preserve for us in clunky old Google Groups.
This Usenet-in-reddit experiment is surprisingly readable. Some of the formatting tricks and conventions from 30 years ago carried over without needing conversion. However, some things still need cleaning up before this is ready to be shown to the world.
If you're interested in helping out, it's a fun little project. Drop me a line!
With usenet, I could easily tell what I haven't read and if a branch deviates from what I'm interested in discussing, I can just ignore that entire branch.
Setting up a private NNTP server and getting people to use a Usenet client is going to be a challenge. I haven't looked, but are there any mobile clients?
I think what I'd want is a forum that emails, but runs so completely off email that you don't have to log in if you so choose -- essentially, a hook on message save to email out if the preference is on, and a smart enough parser on receiving an email to post back to the forum (after email validation and verification, of course). That would be really fun to build, and may be worth some time exploring. If that's a solution you'd like, let me know - I could always use a hacking buddy.
Example: http://forum.dlang.org/ Source: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
They have a walkthrough video here. http://vimeo.com/90926057 Stay with it till the end; it looks like any other forum software until it becomes clear it's all happening over email, without any need for your team to learn a new tool or sign into anything. You can split off new discussions at any time, or make any sublist digest-only.
More specifically, a better UI to use Mailing Lists. Perhaps like vBulletin or other advance forum software. Maybe even built-in support in my email client?
For the life of me, I can't find a good way to use Mailing Lists. I don't like receiving 40+ messages every day, but I don't find digest mode good enough either. Google Groups is clunky, and it gives me no good motivation to return to it. The readability is also not all that great imo. The whole ajaxy thing it has going for it is also bad. I want to read static text on a functional and beautiful UI. It's not too much to ask for. :(