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Group communication on the Internet

• forums (which were used to be called bulletin boards)
• mailing lists
• news groups (=USENET)

The traditional two are mailing lists and news groups which each have their advantages and disadvantages and each have hardened protagonists (fans) and antaganists (anti-fans). The advent of WWW based forums is relatively new. It has the big advantage that there is no problem to subscribe/set it up. Subscribing to a mailing list is a bit more difficult and understanding the mailing list concept even a bit more difficult. Setting up a news groups reader program is the most difficult, but luckily browsers like Netscape now come with an inbuilt news group reader, which helps a lot. When you are still paying for internet-access by duration then it's best to be able to handle your messages off-line. A mailing list is ideal I think, but a program like Free Agent can help read news groups off-line. WWW-based forums can only be read on-line of course. Another problem with forums is that they all operate differently and often very unergonomically. The advantage of a mailing list over the other two is that the people that are on it stay longer on it, read 'everything' and are more experienced and you're more likely to get a good answer (although some of the news:sci.electronics.* veterans are also quite 'old' in the mean time). The advantage of the news groups is that much more people will read your message.

I have never seen any fast-but-not-thorough (=chat) channels work, but let me know if you find anything. The most important media are: IRC, ICQ, AOL-chat and dedicated WWW based chat servers could work.

Modern mailing lists (like those on Yahoogroups) have an interactively accessable archive which you can access as a forum, so it's a kind of combination of the both.

Forums

Mailing lists

News groups

It's now also possible to read news groups via email using www.deja.com/. I have tried it and it works great. You can even respond to messages just as if you're replying to a mailing list.

To search in these news groups for specific subjects:

www.altavista.com/

www.dejanews.com/

www.reference.com/

Using these services is also a great way to read news as normal HTML pages without the need of a special newsreader. But only the latter two allow you to reply to the messages directly.

cs.intel.com/

Intel's own news group system

The two major WWW browsers come with a standard newsreader, but you will need to stay on-line while reading the news. As an off-line newsreader you can use Free Agent (see www.tucows.com for example), but it's not easy to use, because you first need to select the messages you want to read (by subject line only) and then download them in a second pass...
Before I had ADSL I prefered to read mailing lists.

Some 'Please Fix my PC' news groups