2009/9/9 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
Some modern forums have features that can interact very intelligently with email, which to my mind might be the best of both worlds. Such things would still allow the features you mention such as thread locking and removal of abuse from the archive, but would also allow people to continue to receive email copies of posts if that is what they prefer.
I just wrote about Google Group solution at meta
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l#Possible_solutions
where a person can use email or Web interface, as they want. You can even rank every post and every comment (people with a lot of negative votes could think twice about their posts/emails).
For sure there are other (better) technical solutions, but this is easy to implement and I think it's worth trying.
Regards,
Tom