I'd like to offer some fairly straight-shooting thoughts about the communication and site interaction issues, separately to the idea of a static site with a mail back-end.
So let me look at the way things are now, and the way they could become, and give some realistic ideas of what it would cost, and what it would take, to make such a significant change, based solely on what you've described so far. Note that I'm not even thinking about software distribution just yet, only the way the community operates and communicates, as I'm not qualified to even think about software distribution.
One thing I do need to reiterate is that I'm addressing this whole issue from the aspect of a brand-new, modern-day user, familiar with current internet concepts.
The vast majority of these users don't know very much (if anything) about svn, mailing lists mechanisms, newsgroups, or any of the technologies that we take for granted. Have a look at the way Yahoo and Google implement their user interactions they universally implement not newsgroups or nntp clients, not mailinglist access, but a web interface, without exception. Unfortunately, that's the way of the world these days, and will be so for some time to come until the Next Big Thing happens along, I guess! Basically, the sites that rely on nntp access are niche sites with fixed audiences and known demographics, and even they could do much better if they tried.
I do understand and appreciate that you're volunteers, and your budget doesn't extend to multiply-redundant mainframes or dedicated systems managers. That's true of me, too! And I would never intentionally suggest an expensive or high-maintenance solution, ever. Nor would I suggest tools that are the same, or worse, than what you're using right now.
I'm really surprised, to be perfectly honest, at the bizarre perceptions of forum software expressed in the last few days here in these groups!
Forums don't actually work the way some of you think they do, I swear! I would be interested to hear some examples of the terrible forums you've mentioned at various times, they must be shockers. Of course, I don't consider the string-and-glue forums, like Joomla or the pre-canned template type sites as forums, they're more interactive html, which doesn't meet anyone's needs.
I regularly (at least weekly) interact with (at current count) 74 forums and another 25 or so other sites (wikis, ftp, and so on). Most of these forums are PHPBB-based, to some degree, and the rest are similar, though coded differently. So I know what I'm talking about with forum interactions and what works and what doesn't. The best types of forums are those that allow users to be users of the respective software or hobby, without needing to figure out how to post a message, how to reply, and so on. NNTP sites are at the bottom of that list, needless to say.
Without exaggerating or belittling nntp and smtp clients and servers, a forum would do everything and I quite literally mean EVERYTHING that the very best nntp/smtp software does, and it will do it out-of-the-box. Literally.
I appreciate that you don't want to have to rely on a single point of support or failure, and you really don't want to have to pay someone else for doing what you can probably do already now!
But is it more difficult to manage a single forum, than it is to manage what you're using now?
How many of you reading this message could, say, at 6:30 tonight, fix a configuration problem on the mailing list server, if whoever usually looks after it got called away and was uncontactable? From where you sit right now? What about if a hacker logs in to the list and starts spamming the list? How long would it take to shut them down? Would it be possible to keep the list running? What if they got in all the FPC lists? How long would that take? And how long would the server be out of action while that was happening?
I've been there and done that, so I can imagine the chaos - unless you all know each other's phone numbers and you all know how to configure the list server so you can find out who the person is, shut them down, and lock them out, then find a way to identify and remove the messages, then bring up the server again, and so on.
On a properly set up forum, any one of you could log in, disable the account, remove all the messages, and prevent the user from logging in again, in less than a couple of minutes. From your iPhone.
While you're on the bus.
Tell me you can do that with your current software, and I'll shut up about forums for ever! :) And I haven't mentioned the website I can only guess at how difficult it is to arrange for a new release of software or even a news update.
So there are some major, and many minor, benefits to looking seriously at a good forum installation to take the FPC project forward, just from the perspective of keeping things running, and minimising hassle when something does go wrong!
So what about the cost of the software?
The kind of interface I'm thinking of consists of open-source software, exclusively. That's apache, PHP, MySQL, and sendmail. These are not only far more robust and secure than news and mail list servers, they're incredibly easy to install, configure, and maintain. If a 10-year old kid can run a busy (1,500+ messages-per-day) forum after school hours, there's no reason why we can't get something working that will delight and impress the pants off all of us in our little corner of the web. Consider also that this would allow remote administration via web interface from anywhere and any device. All you need are the login credentials, and I doubt you'll be handing those around willy-nilly! So security (in terms of management access) is no more difficult than what you're using now.
So realistically, it would be a huge improvement to make the fpc project available from the same server, at little or no cost for the upgrade, with solid, secure, safe open-source components, presenting an easy-to-use, easy-to-manage access portal that everyone here will know how to use without reading readme's or compiling a single line of code.
Every new user would know instantly how to log in, how to search, and how to ask questions and how to find answers, with no change that anyone has to make to what they already have on all of our computers. If you've got a web browser, you've got secure access. Who wants to search for source code for an nntp client, that may or may not actually work with the server's nntp server, and still have to verify their internal email client's settings to make sure they can both send and receive messages? Who wants to wait until the end of the day for a long list of messages about subjects you're probably mostly not the slightest bit interested in, looking for a response to a question you've posted the day before? Not me, and not anyone I know of. I'd rather get immediate notifications of threads (questions) I'm involved with, or interested in, than wait 24 hours for any possible response!
Hey, if you like pain, go for it! But please don't expect new users to want to go through the same arcane process. Because I can tell you, right now, that they don't. And they aren't going to in the future, either.
This still leaves a lot to discuss. We need to understand some pretty critical information still. Like how big are your mailing archives? Judging by the statistics on the FPC main page, you have a grand total of around 700 questions, in total, since 2000!!
Of course I'm assuming that those statistics are wrong (by at least a couple of orders of magnitude!), so it would help if we could find out the actual size, in terms of storage capacity and number of messages. If you've got a typical mail list archive, we'd need to think about how to migrate 50,000 or so individual messages from each year into the database, which would imply that we need pretty robust automated tools.
But if there are fewer messages than is usual for a project of this size and complexity, it might make more sense just to write some shell scripts or something. Or maybe an FPC project competition? Get the users interested and involved and show off their skills writing platform-independent code to retrieve and reindex and store the messages on a remote database server?
I wanted to say more, but I've already made this painfully long. I'm sorry about the length, but these are ideas and concepts that would better be discussed face-to-face, where we would have the luxury of telling me to shut the **** up!! ;) So I'd rather take a long time to explain exactly what I mean, than risk 2 or 3 or more days of back-and-forth "What do you mean by ----?""But have you thought about -----?" and so on.
Please have a think about all this, and please don't kill me for posting such a humungous glob of a message yet again!
Hopefully, these are ideas many of you have already been considering for some time, and if not, I do hope they give you some hope for new ideas in the future!
Again, I'll leave the subject in your hands now, I've been harassing you enough, and you've already been so patient and helpful and interesting!
-Pete
P.S. Sven, if you're referring to my spelling using the letter 's', that's because I'm Australian, and we use the British system of spelling words ending in ize with an 's'. Hopefully that explains what you wanted to know! Otherwise, I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean by the "S" question you posed, but please clarify if you need! Hope this helps! -Pete