I initially felt this way about forum posts, but after reading Joel Spolsky's take on it in Building Communities with Software,[1] I changed my mind. Basically

I initially felt this way about forum posts, but after reading Joel Spolsky's take on it in Building Communities with Software,[1] I changed my mind. Basically the reasoning was: do this and you'll never get your forum to critical mass -- new users will just read replies to their questions in their inbox and never come back to the forum and contribute. He never says it's not okay to enable this functionality after you have a solid userbase, though. =) [1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...