This article is based on material authored by members of the news.newusers.questions Moderation Board and nnq-workers mailing list, particularly by Jon Bell. The original article was last updated in 2005.
There are many different ways to get people together to discuss something on the Internet. Here are some of them, with some tips on advantages, disadvantages, and where to look for more information on how to create them.
Newsgroups are distributed among tens of thousands of news servers operated by Internet service providers (ISPs), universities, companies and other organizations - in some cases even by private persons. Each server receives (hopefully) copies of all messages in a newsgroup, and stores them in a sort of database. News servers automatically exchange these messages among themselves, to keep each other's databases up to date.
Each participant in a newsgroup reads messages from, and posts messages to, his/her local news server, using news-reading software such as the newsgroup module in Microsoft ® Outlook Express.
A mailing list is possibly the simplest kind of forum. Participants subscribe to a mailing list by having their email address placed on a list of addresses that are to receive messages about a certain topic. They post messages to the list by sending email to a "list address", from whence copies are forwarded by email to all the participants. The participants receive the messages along with their other email and handle them the same way they do their other email.
Mailing lists are normally managed partly or completely automatically using list-server software such as Majordomo, Listserv or Listproc. Your ISP may provide this service for their users.
A web-based bulletin board is hosted on a web site. To use it, participants point their web browsers to a certain URI (web address) and see a list of message subjects. They can post messages by entering them into a form on a web page. Your ISP may offer this service, or you can use a standalone provider.
If you have your own web site, your hosting service may have web board software available, or you may be able to install it.
The different kinds of forums each have advantages and disadvantages in various respects:
Everybody knows how to send and receive email (right? :-). Using a mailing list involves little more than knowing where to send a message so that it gets posted, which is usually taken care of by your mail software's reply function.
The main problems from the participant's point of view are:
With a web-based bulletin board, participants have to figure out how to use each particular board's interface, which can (and probably does) vary from one board to the next. However, they don't have to worry about their mailboxes while on vacation; all the messages are stored on the board's hosting site, which removes old messages as necessary.
With a newsgroup, the "user interface" varies from one person to another, depending on the software he/she's using (e.g. Microsoft ® Outlook Express or Forté Agent), but it's the same for all newsgroups (for that person). So if you know how to access one newsgroup, you know how to access them all. Also, similar to a web board, the messages are stored on your news server, which expires old messages automatically, so you don't have to worry about your mailbox.
With a mailing list or Web board, the owner can have complete control over who participates and what gets posted. Most newsgroups are instead unmoderated, which means that anyone can participate and can post anything he/she wants, subject only to "peer pressure" from other participants, and/or regulation by his/her own ISP. This can make it hard to keep a newsgroup focused on a particular topic.
Some newsgroups are moderated, which means that someone (or a group of people, or even a software "robot") examines all postings before they actually appear in the newsgroup. These groups can be controlled much like a mailing list or Web board, but frankly, if you're new to all this, you probably don't even want to think about creating a moderated newsgroup, because it involves major technical issues that even experienced newsgroup users have to struggle with.
To some extent, newsgroups publicize themselves. People can "stumble upon" them while browsing through the list of newsgroups that their server provides. They can also find groups by using search engines such as Google Groups (formerly DejaNews). People can also find web-based bulletin boards by doing web searches on the topic, and mailing lists by using a search engine, but both probably depend more on word-of-mouth publicity.
Once you've found a host site for your mailing list or web-based bulletin board, you can set it up quickly. Because it doesn't physically exist anywhere else besides the host site, you don't have to get anybody else's permission besides that of the host site operator.
Newsgroups, however, are distributed among tens of thousands of news servers all over the world. In order for a newsgroup to be viable, a significant number of server administrators must create the group locally on their servers. Therefore, you have to generate support for your newsgroup among other people, in order to convince those administrators (either directly or indirectly) that it's worth while to create the group. Exactly how you do this depends on what kind of newsgroup you want to create.
If a mailing list or web-based bulletin board doesn't work out, or if you can't continue to run it for some reason, it's easy to discontinue it, as it exists on only one server. A newsgroup, on the other hand, usually cannot be removed from all of the servers that carry it. You can simply abandon it, but then it accumulates spam and other garbage.
If you want to create a forum for a specific, well-defined group of people (your friends, your company's customers, college classmates, a church congregation, etc.), and if you want to have some control over what goes on in the forum, you're probably best off creating a mailing list or web-based bulletin board.
If your potential audience is widespread and not very well definable in advance (in terms of specific people), and your topic has widespread interest, and is not already being covered by another newsgroup, then it may be worthwhile to try to create a newsgroup for it. But doing this is very much a political process, because you have to gain the cooperation of a lot of people. You should therefore learn about the process in advance, and observe it in action for a while by watching other groups being created, before you try to do it yourself.