[lierduh]

Originally Posted by BustaCap

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.

So the benefit only comes down to that particular user's username is used instead of a 'Guest post' in the forums? (oh, also the post count is boosted by one?). When a list member (who is also your forum member) posts to the list by sending an email, he or she will receive all the messages in the email. A filter would need to be activated in his/her email clients to get rid of all the messages coming from the mailing list. So that he/she can read the same messages in your forum with some of the reading benefits that a forum provides (may be)? An email client usually does threading too.

There are quite a few benefits by using email to participate in a mailing list instead of using a forum interface. eg.

1) No delay of sending the message
2) Alerted straight away when a reply is available
3) Knowing the format sent will be the format seen in the email
...

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.

I can fully understand someone who wants to use the proper way to participate in a mailing list. I can however understand people who do not trust a forum to send the message.

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.

My point of view comes from providing the functionality that are logical to general users. Or providing options for different users to make them logical.

I guess what you want to set up is (let me know if it is not):

* Let only handful of forum members to post in the mailing list forum, perhaps by setting forum permission.
* They need to subscribe to the list using the same email address as the email address they use for the forums

I think finding the methodology is the hard part.

Looks like the mailing list part of the function has taken over the usenet part. It can only be:

1) The usenet part just works without the need to post a message
2) There are plenty demand for the mailing list function (should I say list archive function at this stage)