Two ideas, not entirely original: 1) The techie in me says It would be an interesting project to create the e-mail and web interfaces described in an MV system. (What a concept, a database for massive amounts of structured data...) It wouldn't have the bells and whistles of established e-mail listservers (for a while anyway), nor of established web forums, but it would be possible to store the data in an MV environment which then populates one of the standard web forum software packages through an API, or a web interface can be written.
2) The more practical side of me says: There is a comp.databases.Pick and a comp.databases.Revelation (which isn't used), and comp.databases.ibm-db2. Maybe it's time for comp.databases.ibm-u2.tech and comp.databases.ibm-u2.misc? I believe this has been alluded to by Kevin Zollinger, James Hogan, and Dawn Wolthuis, to some extent. Personally I don't like e-mail forums. I prefer Usenet where Google can do the archiving and I can use real news software to track threaded discussions. Usenet can be browsed with e-mail, web browser, _and_ a real Usenet reader. It's also pull technology. E-mail is pull technology to an extent as well, but it's more push technology because it pushes itself into the e-mail queue. I think the only reason people won't like this is that a lot of people don't understand what Usenet is, and they won't want to get a new reader. Well folks, e-mail was never designed for this sort of thing, Usenet was. Another change that would need to be made is that people will have to learn to stop posting real e-mail addresses and URLs. You can post what you want to Usenet but harvesting programs WILL create spam for every address made available to the public. To curb some of the issues, a private server can be setup, available by registration and login only, but since it's so easy to register to the list I can see spammers registering to a private server as soon as they find it. Tony I wrote a Usenet client in D3, after that, anything is possible. :) James Hogan wrote: >> Seems to me a system where >> * email ("the list") carries on as usual >> * All emailed responses are submitted as forum responses >> * All forum responses are whooshed out to the list as email > >>I would whole-heartedly agree with this. BUT I have never >>seen such an animal in action myself. I think it's mythical. >>Will > >I have certainly been involved in usenet newsgroups that are >linked in this way. I gave an example in previous emails. It >has been developed for forums too, as per my email below, >which no one to date has commented on. [snip] > >-----Original Message----- [snip Mail 2 Forum info] -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users