Re: how about using a bulletin board instead of mail list?

> just out of curiosity, why aren't the PHP groups > served by a bulletin board system instead of a mailing > list system (aside from the obvious cost, server > requirements, etc.)? > > http://www.ultimatebb.com/ has a popular and friendly > BB system. I think it only costs 199$/installed > server. assuming the hosts of these PHP lists could > afford the increased bandwidth demands, it would sure > make life easier with features like board sections, > topics, threads, etc. Probably because bulletin boards are slower and have weaker interfaces. Just a single thing - the message volume to this list - makes a web-based bulletin board package a bad idea as none of the bulletin board packages handle high message volumes well. UBB in particular has a particularly bad user interface, shoddy code and doesn't perform well. Also note that email allows people to use their favorite email client, which may provide things like threading and a number of other features (e.g. filtering) that web-based bulletin board software does not provide. Finally, it will have *much* higher performance than a web based package just because the transfer volumes are much lower (only the message, without the extra HTML and graphics) and the messages are batch-downloaded and viewed locally.