MOTM

I can appreciate all of the points of view on this subject, both pro &
con web-based forums as opposed to an email group. I guess I'm
interested to see how this will work out because I've never been a fan
of the Yahoo group and have had my share of issues with it over the past
ten years.

However, speaking as a web developer, I'm kind of astonished that an
application couldn't be developed to answer for the shortcomings that
people are expressing here. When I'm digging for information, a
categorized forum is a help. A search feature that works across
categories alleviates the problems of topic drift. A sidebar showing the
last 25 posts to any forum helps reveal what might not be seen in a
category. A flexible emailing feature seems pretty straight-forward, so
those that want instant emails or daily digests can opt into them...
Those that only want emails when their thread has been updated can have
it that way. Even making an annual text-file "dump" of the forum is only
a SQL query away.

I can't think of a reason why a fairly simple application couldn't
provide all of the features of both worlds, and more.

Are there really no apps that provide these kinds of features...? Is
there money to be made in this area?  :)