ITBoards.com is a hosting provider for online communities.  Our communities offer integrated e-mail, web, newsgroup, RSS feeds, and chat.  That means each member of your community has one account and can chose to participate in your community via:

• E-mail: Our mailing lists offer mail based subscribe and unsubscribe
• News: users can participate, if they choose, via nntp and a newsreader.
• Web: Our online web-based inteface offers polls, calendars, message ranking, sorting, and more.  Since it is integrated with all the other interfaces, you have an archive of posts.
• RSS Feeds:  You can use a feed reader to catch up on new posts
• Chat:  Your users can participate live via a web-based chat client or their own client (like mIRC).

As a board manager, you can offer more than just a plain web-based forum -- you can offer your subscribers a choice in how and where they participate.  Our boards are ad-frree; no banners,  ad text in every e-mail, etc.