That *is* the default for mailing list archives. But that default will be more difficult to hack to integrate your fancy proposals e.g. avatars for posters.

The midgard integrated web-to-list forums is an additional work that was started and is now stagnant. You could help deciding whether we (and just to make sure "we" is the Maemo community e.g. you) want to keep developing the Midgard integration to make it better than the Mailman archives or just drop the effort and concentrate on other things.