I think the biggest barrier to this new fourm taking off will be the extra time, cognative effort and inertia it takes to click through and see what is being discussed.
Previouslly one could quickly and efficiently see messages as one worked through emails and as they came in. So people could choose to either ignore, lurk/learn or reply in real time. This gave a certain vibrancy to the conversation.
However, now people need to click on a link to be taken through to the thread-which removes the 'real life' feel of the conversation. It is also an 'inertia' barrier since on any given day we all have a ton of emails to go through and the extra time and cognative effort it takes to get to the actual content is certainly something which will prevent many of us from clicking through.
It also makes it harder to see something in passing (when I really ought to be doing something else....) and get 'hooked' into the discussion.
Consquently, is there anyway to have the messages come in as they are posted. The actual messages that is, not just the subject?
This could be an option, and would give virtually the same functionality as the previous well used system with the minor change of one needing to click on a link when replying -which is a minor barrier when planning to actually write something.