Why? Mailing lists have a common UI (your email client), they are easier to archive locally, messages are processable entities (can be easily tagged, filtered, forwarded, etc) and they can be used when the service is offline.
The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
I think "a good archive for new members" is more important than just the "only" suggests.
The reason it's lacking shows the problem with mailing lists: they restrict participation to those who were members at the time. Yes, there's a limited ability to have search after the fact, but most of the web UIs are awful, and the search is weak.
Worse still is if you join late and somehow find a thread from 2010, there's no way to revive it with updated information or corrections. So the archives suffer terribly from bitrot, in some cases sending latecomers down the wrong path for years to come.
In a well-designed forum, by contrast, threads "live" forever. When something useful needs to be said or asked, a thread can spring back to life. As a result, their archives remain useful for longer, and they don't need to suffer nearly as much from newcomers asking the same old FAQs, either.
To boot, with the right forum, you can also have posts sent to your email, for all the local benefits you mention.
Fair enough, but frankly well-designed and well-run forums are few and far between. And even less support real threading, which I consider a killer feature for this kind of discussions.
> The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
Three data points/opinions:
- at least some mailing lists let you download an archive file for a given month, e.g. [0].
- I much prefer navigating the web interface of a mailing list than navigating a forum, simply because mostforumslackproperthreading, not to mention the bazillion of blinking .GIFs, unnecessary Javascript and all that other superfluous crap that is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
- Not to mention that searching a mailing list archive is trivial if you keep it locally and even if you don’t, it will still work. Trying to find something on e.g. talk.maemo.org, I always have to resort to Google with some site: operator, and even then the results are usually worse than those returned by a comparable search run on the web archive of a mailing list.
The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.