Is this forum really necessary, when there is sci.physics.computational.fluid-dynamics newsgroup? What should be the difference?

One response I could make is the fact that many people work in a network environment protected by a firewall and often do not have access to newsgroups. Therefore the presence of a forum on the Web is a big plus.

This forum is a complement to s.p.c.f-d and gives the users of CFD Online and the CFD Jobs Database a place to meet on the web.

As Fabien says many people do not have access to usenet news, others have access but do not know how to use news. A web based forum has a few advantages also - interesting threads and discussions can be saved whereas things with non-lasting interest can be selectively removed. It is also possible to search this forum for keywords.

This forum could also easily be split into many different forums, covering for example different commercial codes. Usenet news does not offer the same flexibility.

Having an area dedicated to commercial CFD codes is a great idea but runs the risk of being very abused. The last thing this forum wants is a slanging match between highly competitive companies.

An http based discussion forum always was, and always will be, a great idea. How about an annual prize for the most original posting Jonas?

Nice idea with an annual prize, just need to find someone who will sponsor it. Financing of this site is still very tight. This forum has only been going for a week or two so we'll see how it develops.

About abuse, commercial "mud-slinging" and so on. Lets deal with that if or when it occurs. I have a feeling the online CFD community is fairly well behaved in this respect. I'm well aware of the problems that might lie ahead.

I see it as an advantage if commercial companies are present here - take the posts by Russell King for example - a great opportunity for people interested in electronics cooling to ask him about what fluent has in this area. And everything he says will be read by a whole bunch of independent observers... If he says something that isn't true I'm sure someone will object.

[jwm]

My host institution stopped supporting USENET (news) a couple of years ago.

At the time I was moderator of the group sci.physics.plasma - and most of my time was spent removing unrelated ads (spam) from the postings. If you go to any unmoderated news group you will find that they are 90% spam. My observations of web based discussion groups is that they are pretty free from spam. I'm not sure why this is.

[RobinB]

Yeh Russell, what has Fluent got in this area, anything new?

[Marcus]

I'm very happy to see this move to a real forum. Newsgroups are unwieldy for topics this broad, and to see it properly organized into sub-topics is much more friendly. I know I'll visit here a lot more often than I did before.

[jola]

Talk about waking up ancient threads.... you managed to dig up a message from 1998 when this forum was first started. I'm impressed and a bit concerned. If we start waking up many 10 year old threads the forum will get very messy and we might be forced to close all old threads, which is a bit sad since that removes all possibilities to responed to old threads that are still of interest.

The concern that web based discussion forums would not be needed because of usenet news isn't exactly a valid concern any more. I'd bet that the majority of users here today do not even know what usenet news is.