Just playing devils advocate here for a bit. Here are some features
that I like when I hit a forum that seem to be missing from
nabble/mailing lists with search.

 * Sticky posts i.e. dedicated threads that hang around. For a while
there was a lot of trouble compiling octave on ubuntu and it really
wasn't that easy to find the old posts.

 * Forum sections would be nice and search doesn't always work out.
For example if I want to know what's going on in image processing in
octave, I'm not sure all posts will have the term "image processing".

 * Forums can be easier to browse if you're just curious and want to
learn. For example there could be a forum on vectorization tricks. How
would you search for that?

 * Subscribing to a mailing list does seem to require a greater level
of commitment than a forum including setting up filtering rules etc.
Occasionally, I've hit a forum and I can answer a question I'll just
create a quick account and join the discussion.

 * Search doesn't work if you don't know the shop-talk.

Presumably an alternative would be to create separate mailing lists
for each octave-help-ubuntu@, octave-help-image-processing@,
octave-help-vectorization-tricks@, ... But to me that seems even worse
than doing nothing. Supposedly, ubuntuforums.org is a vBullitin
frontend to mailman. Maybe that could help?


--judd

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