Henning Schlottmann wrote:
Mailing lists are push media and they are one stop: the new posts come to my own mail folders automatically. Their look and feel is always the same: that of my mail program (or web mail operator). Browsing through "your" web boards in the morning takes much, much more time than with appropriately processes mailing lists.
Moderation and s/n ration: If you read mailing lists as (pseudo) newsgroups, which is of course the recommended way of access, every reader has the most comfortable options for filtering and scoring. Web boards have central, mailing lists individual moderation. You, the reader, can filter authors, topics, threads or whatever you want or don't want to read. That gives you autonomy and responsibility.
The only real advantage of web boards is that they run in a browser and everyone thinks they can use them. Processing and reading mailing lists is much more comfortable, but obviously not anyone knows how to do that anymore.
Seems to me that the mailing list is working just fine, despite a few people who complain far too much about the volume of traffic, or about the occasional tendency to irrelevant comments. They need to exercise a little more patience and tolerance. The situation is a classic case of "If it ain't broke don't fix it."
Ec