General Observations

[Warren Togami]

Sites utilizing bulletin board scripts like OpenTopic, UBB, vBulletin,
Ultraboard and others maintain vibrant online communities.  Check out these
sites.

http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=cfrm&s=50009562
http://www.ffonline.com/cgi-local/ubb/Ultimate.cgi
http://www.hardforum.com/
http://www.athlonmb.com/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi

I would argue that these are a bit more intuitive and convenient than a
mailing list.  Most of these are written in perl or PHP, so if desired, with
a quick hack all posts could be cross posted to the mailing list.  (Though I
wouldn't advise it.  Traffic will quickly become too high.)  This would also
take care of the archiving question that someone brought up.

I personally have ran a site with thousands of visitors using UBB and I have
found it to work very well.  I'm sure any of the above software would work
great.  Freshmeat has those and a few other perl and PHP boards listed.

> more stable and vibrant online community would be great for people like
> me.  A bulletin board at the LUAU website (possibly using Jive
> www.coolservlets.com would help).  My point is that it seems that the
> online interaction