My experience is that all the web fororae I have tried to follow have  
been a pain in the neck.
a) you have to be online to see them
b) you have to remember to go there, look for stuff etc.
c) they degenerate too often into nests of html postings
d) it's too easy to not even notice stuff that would be interesting

Mail lists arrive automagically with all my other mail. Filters and  
rules put messages in (roughly) the right places. I scan them to  
delete or keep, getting an idea of the current gestalt of the community.

Essentially, move to a web forum and you'd lose my involvement.  
Whether that is a good thing or not is for you to say. I suspect  
you'd loses a lot of other people too.

On the other had a web forum typically makes a good interface to  
archives, which has some advantages. Why can't we have both? Surely  
there is a way to have a web forum accept the feed from the maillist  
and have it do the sorting? If there isn't, then go away and write  
one. I would note that there is apparently a GMane newsgroup shadow  
of the squeak list. See http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/608 for  
details.

Oh, and as for having polls - forget it. If anyone thinks that I'd  
take any notice of a poll over the (small) number of people whose  
opinion I value when doing VMMaker work... well, maybe they need to  
stop sniffing the glue.


tim
-- 
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim