[luau] Re: web forums

[Eric Jeschke]

| It is not a psychological reason, it is a technical reason.  There 
| currently exists no viable mailing list to web board gateway that 
| maintains the best of both worlds.
| 
| Such a thing could however be coded for phpBB.  It would be a major 
| technical hurdle, but it would be a great boon to many communities.

I guess that (barring some new hacking) leaves news<-->mail gateways as
the best solution for implementing this kind of hybrid system.  I've had
trouble finding decent web-based newsreaders though.  There is a PHP
module for NNTP, which a few of the readers I've seen use.  They are all
pretty primitive compared to a full graphical newsreader like Mozilla
though. 

And why not use Mozilla?  1) Some people cannot be bothered to configure
a news reader, even though it is pretty trivial; they just want to point
their browser at the site and have it "just work".  2) A news backend
doesn't give you some of the advantages that a database-backed BBoard
can give you.

I'm suprised this functionality (email gateways) is not in the web forum
software yet; it's not like this is rocket science.

--Eric

Eric Jeschke
http://redskiesatnight.com/