Good news! Thanks to cbeard and the folks at Mozilla Labs, I now have placeholder forums where discussion can ensue in a public place, without requiring every post to be approved by me.

For starters, I created three fora: one for Thunderbird Planning, one for discussion of Internet Communications Innovations, and one for random MailCo topics if they come up. We’ll see if those are the right ones as things move along.

I look forward to reading everyone’s contributions there! Feel free to add comments on my blog posts or email me if appropriate, of course.

For people who are new to Thunderbird, you should also check out MozillaZine’s forums, several of which are about Thunderbird — they’re a good place to find day-to-day support and discussions.

Meta comments:

• The labs forums site was chosen for three simple reasons: 1) it provides RSS feeds, which I see as a requirement, 2) it could be done very quickly with minimal coordination, 3) there’s something experimental about all of this! I’m happy to consider alternatives in the future.

• I should explain as well why I’m using web-based forums rather than a mailing list or newsgroup. Basically, I believe that newsgroups are too obscure outside of the fairly insular “insider” community, and that mailing lists require too much commitment on the part of participants, whether that’s adding to their email load or requiring them to customize their mail flow to triage mailing list traffic. The market has spoken, and web forums seem to have won when it comes to “level” public discussion spaces (as opposed to blogs). RSS feeds are there for those of us who can’t take yet another destination and need integration.

  (If someone knows how to do a two-way integration between the SMF forums and a mailing list so that everyone can interact with the forums in their favorite way, I’m happy to see how hard that would be to add.)

PS: I have a hard time writing “forums” instead of “fora”, but I’m being good and fitting with the flow!