Which one is better for many to many communication?

• Mailing lists?
• Web forums?
• News groups?

Personally as far as Perl is concerned I'v only had experiences with clpmisc and PM. I have joined the latter only recently while I have learned about perl more at the former than from any other resource. Also, in terms of UI I have a preference for mails et similia, so taking into account these two circumstances you won't be surprised to know that I prefer NGs to MLs and MLs to Web-based forums.

However which "is better" is such a personal matter that I really couldn't answer your question with a non-biased judgement...

Still from the POV of my limited experience I'd say that somewhat surprisingly I find PM to be less addictive than clpmisc: see e.g. this (last!) article of mine, also available from Google.

Talking about communication quality and effectiveness, I'd feel inclined to say that they're also better in the mentioned NG. But that is plainly not true for things are not that simple.

On the one hand there is a general consenus amongst knowledgeable posters in clpmisc about good behavioural rules. This works 99% of times to achieve an extremely effective communication, and only in a minority of cases flames sustained by newbies who can't stop ranting about people being harsh to them and not giving them the kind of answer they want (e.g. "feed me mum!").

In brief it's much more of a RTFM kinda environment than PM. And the latter is more forgiving in turn. Thus IMHO some discussions here turn out on the average to be qualitatively slightly inferior. There's simply a different behavioural consensus: for example in some sense I have been bashed here for Re: Taking advantage of multi-processor architecture, whereas I can hardly imagine being bashed for it on clpmisc.

OTOH clpmisc is very much about how to do things in perl, and much less so than e.g. about perl per se. And while indeed technically advanced discussions do arise there every now and again, my first impression is that they're more likely to pop out here, well at least in the appropriate sections, that is...

Note: what I find at all effects appealing are integrated communication networks. So I'd be very fond of a community based on system supporting all three of a newgruoup, a mailing list and a web-based forum (well, to some approximation there is already stuff like that, e.g. many Perl mailing lists themselves also have a news-based gateways.) and all giving access to all of their respective resources, or as much as possible.