>>People will prefer a to search in a forum with its many search >>possibilities than in this.
I disagree, but let me expand the discussion beyond just "search possibilities". The purpose of a mail reflector is to make the process of keeping up with what's happening on a particular area of specialty, like this one, easy and convenient. Most of us have several interests and as such would be burdened by the requirement involved in going to a particular URL, navigating screens, entering passwords, and then reading lists of headers to determine what we want to read, then navigating further into a potentially-arcane interface. Foxboard would lose me as a contributor because I simply don't have the time. I suspect I'm not alone in this sentiment. The issue for me, here, is spam and other societal refuse that washes ashore via "yahoo", plus "yahoo"'s penchant for poor security and US government collusion. If fox could set up a simple mail reflector on a server somewhere (certain mail reflector software do have search capabilities and via a web interface if you need it) then they'd eliminate the spam problem and retain people who prefer this method. Years ago Dallas semiconductor (makers of the famous 1-wire chips) determined that they would abandon their mail reflector and set up a web-based "forum". The result was a precipitous decrease in participation and a spin-off of the same mail list by another person which has kept up a very good level of activity despite Dallas abandoning it. I suspect Dallas wanted to reduce the level of activity that *they* had to handle and what better way than to abandon a simple mail reflector. Must we go through the same pain here? /mark richards
