You're telling me that firing a message to the subscribe address, or clicking on a subscribe button, is more difficult than registering at a forum?
Edit: note that the former only requires an email address, while in a forum you have to fill much more data (ok, you can fake it, but still you have to fill the form) and keep track of yet another username and password.
If anything, the barrier of entry is higher on a forum.

luca: You're right. I was being argumentative and snarky.

There is one big advantage of Usenet and e-mail over a forum: the raw data is parsed by the user's client and this can be processed by the user in any way they want.

You cannot do this with WWW (this very much helped the commercialization of the Internet btw). 'Web 2.0', JavaScript, CSS, XML, RSS, extensions attempt to make life easier by giving back some power to the user; but the core issue is still there. This conflicts with HIGs and such, and before you know it you have all kind of themes and websites optimized for all kind of devices. Or clients which pull the data via HTTP://, abstract it, and then put it in an optimized UI again.

OTOH because some metadata is saved server side (what have you read last time you logged in) some settings are saved for any logged in client. In e-mail this is the case as well, but not with Usenet.

IRC is an entirely different beast because it is real-time interaction and meant as such.

I believe e-mail and Usenet are good ways to communicate provided they are useful on the device we serve (including, preferably, backwards compatibility) with easy howtos to get these working well 1) effeciently 2) aesthetically on the device. Then, all the users are on an abstract platform while the power users can draw the power from their client and make everything the way they want it to be.

Ah, so we'll just need a QWK exporter for talk.maemo.org and a QWK reader for Maemo.

Just a NNTP client which doesn't support HTML. Like tin or slrn. Or Mozilla Thunderbird if you wish...

Either way, it's heavy coding for bronze age tech.

Offering a range of RSS and XML feeds from talk.maemo.org might be an alternative. I know next to nothing of vBulletin, but here are some quick examples:

• General as RSS or XML
• General and Applications as RSS or XML