I think one thing that has been missed in the discussion is that a forum does not replace a mailing list. Not A maling list. But it replaces several.
I for example participate in a forum about Android devices (it's a swedish forum called Swedroid). There are sub-forums for apps, games, android in general, and not to forget there are sub-forums for almost all Android phone models. We are talking about MANY forums here. Now, if the forum instead was like 30 different mailing lists, the moderators would not have the ability to move posts between different sub-forums. And the moderation possibilities of a forum is one great advantade (posts can be moved, topics can be split or joined). And even more important, spam and similar posts can be moderated before everybody has read them. With a mailing list there is usually no way to remove a post once it's posted. /Peter
