forum vs Ng's

The great thing with newsgroups is that they (in theory) last forever, so there're archives of a.f.lr on nntp servers around the world. I'm a member of very informative web forum (telemarktips.com) which unfortunately got hacked a few years ago and lost many years of collective wisdom :-(

Also, by having everything landy related in one place, and indexed by Google, it makes finding things much easier than searching dozens of web forums, many with less than brilliant search functions.

The downside is the lack of moderation on netnews, but many groups manage to be self-moderating quite well.

AC.

"Many groups" is another plus, I'm subscribed to quite a lot (about 15 or so I think), with web forums that'd be 15 different websites with their own interfaces and logins. Web forums are also slower to get from one article to the other and there are moderators on web forums, which is *not* a positive thing.

I've had experience of long-established newsgroups fragmenting as users have shifted their attention to blogs and forums. Forums can be good for specifics, and can better support such things as useful images, but they're essentially specialised clubs. There's nothing wrong with using a forum, but for some things they're just too focused.