nntp / usenet. It had moderation problems, because it was built for the world where the internet was academics only, but it worked great before everyone came to

nntp / usenet. It had moderation problems, because it was built for the world where the internet was academics only, but it worked great before everyone came to the internet, and it still works great if posting permissions are properly managed (say, a company internal nntp server). The problems with nntp where of the same kind that email has with spam these days, except they arrived there earlier. However, the thing that really killed nntp was the fact that it was not supported in Outlook, at a time when Outlook was dominant enough to kill it (and promoting Sharepoint groups at the same time, which were inferior at the time). So we are now left with google groups (proprietary, and hosted, and only by google), mailing lists (which are inferior in most ways, especially onboarding), phpBB and similar forums (which are inferior in most ways, except moderation).