Did you notice our Bennyfactor has created a forum of his own?

[Mack Ramer]

http://new.iaatb.net/

[Ryan]

Great minds think alike.

I dunno: to me, webforums have always held the greatest appeal for serious expression of ideas. E-mail and instant messaging are too exclusive of the community, and their attempts to counter this weakness -- grouplist e-mails and chatrooms, respectively -- are too exclusive of interpersonal relationship building. A happy medium is found on a webforum where one can elect either to post threads publically or to send messages privately, and where directed comments or criticisms can be made to a specific person but at the same time be held up to public scrutiny.

That, and I love the tree-branch structure of webforums. You don't get that with e-mail, IM, or weblogs. All too often, people are either "all-or-none" for a weblog. But for a webforum? You can have multitudes of people with disparate interests come together on the same site because each finds his particular niche forum (or subforum) of interest where he posts. As an example, somebody who only likes the Pokemon cartoon can sign up at a Pokemon webforum and post just in the Anime forum. Somebody else who likes the Pokemon video games can sign up at the same site and just post in the Video Games section. And somebody who likes both can sign up at the same site and post in both forums. Webforums consolidate data/knowledge and not at the expense of their contributors' sanity.