[BustaCap]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Once they are subscribed, there is very little benefit for them to post through the forum instead of just shoot an email directly to the list.

Actually, just the opposite. By posting through the forum you are letting your posts be indexed and searchable by user name, otherwise the posts are by "guest". I use that feature quite often on the rest of my forum. Also, the biggest benefit in my opinion is that it's much easier to follow threads in a forum with threaded posts as compared to email lists where posts are received in your mailbox. If you don't read the list every day, it's a real pain trying to follow topics in your inbox vs. threaded posts on your forum.

However, for some reason I'll never understand, there will always be people who only want to participate via email. Thus the need for both the forum and email list and not just one or the other.

Originally Posted by lierduh

2)Closed list. There isn't a good clear solution. Even if you offer your master email address as the posting email address with other user's forum user name. It will not be a good picture to be honest. It is kind of cheating, and unrespectful to the list owner, since the list is a close list. I really need to think again about how to handle this. One thing a forum ower does not want to have is to have the list members hating your forums. The same goes for newsgroups.

It sounds like you are assuming that I'm not the list master. As it happens I'm not . But my point is that you are looking at this from only one point of view, which is putting the forum owner in a dishonest light. Of course, I would never do this without a discussion with the list owner as well as the list users. I mentioned before that only lists users would have posting privileges, making the "closed" list not an issue. It would only be done with everyone?s approval. However, when I suggest it I would like to be able to demonstrate how it would work, but I can't do that without a working system

I'm quite sure that if it worked like how I hope it will that everyone would be agreeable to it since it would benefit both the list and the forum; increased exposure for both groups and imo, a much better user interface with the forum.