Also, mobile accessibility of web-based forums is poor. Like all complex web applications, they won't work uniformly well accross different browsers, esp. embedded ones.
And e-mail has mechanisms for authentication. You can sign your messages with your private key using GPG, the signature will be distributed to the members of the mailing list along with your message without interfering with normal operation. You can't do this with a web-based forum. Using e-mail, you can also privately mesage members of the list without the administrator of the mailing list knowing it. With a web-based forum, the mail address of members generally remains hidden, and users have to go through the private message system of the forum, allowing the admins or hackers to spy on, disrupt or modify "private" messages exchanged between users. For a mailing list where topics as sensitive as cold fusion are discussed, this is totally inappropriate. -- Berke Durak
