So if I build a social network on Ning I can add forums which are kind of cool except that noone actually knows that new stuff has been posted and don’t bother checking back in. It doesn’t seem to matter what options you provide – RSS feeds, offers to email notifications of new threads etc – people drift away from forums very quickly once their question has been answered. On the other hand, mailing lists tend to be harder to get people to use in the first place because you have to subscribe, but then they tend to stick around longer because they’ve already subscribed. If in that time you manage to teach them a few things they didn’t know they needed to know they hang around permanently and the community grows.

Coming back to Ning, it has lots of cool features and user management etc etc etc, but it doesn’t seem to have any kind of mailing list at all. Ideally I’d like the forums to also have a mailing list option but if not, is it possible to just have a mailing list so people can join a group and they’re automatically added to the mailing list? I can even host the mailing list software myself but it would need to be kept in sync.

It goes without saying that whatever solution I come up with would be clearly labelled as subscribing to a mailing list etc etc etc – it’s not an attempt to fool people into opting into e-mail. All done in good faith and with all the nasty little details to be thought out in full before implementation, but right now I’m brainstorming.