"Best Platform"

Dang kids and their web 2.0 bling. All web forums are a vastly inferior copy of things like email lists and newsgroups (NNTP) that have been around for years and years.

Seriously, an email list with a searchable web archive is infinitely more useful than a forum, especially if you happen to be interested in more than one thing. This is the only forum I actually post on, or even visit. With email all the information I'm interested funnels to me, my email tools sort the messages so I can view at my own priority, moderated email lists cut down hugely on spam, etc. Oh, and it's not a pig of a service that requires major data center hosting. Moderated NNTP groups are even better for this sort of thing.

-j, internet curmudgeon