Well, until there are more comments in here, it's hard to tell. So far no surprises ... which is a good thing. It seems that http://meetro.com is blocked from my company. It says because it's an IM site. I can reach http://lefora.com, however.
So would you say that Lefora is comparable to Google Groups or Yahoo Groups except without the email component?
I was reading their feature list. They follow the current trend of light documentation. I'd like to learn all about a product before I buy in. Okay, it's free but if I have to invest in setting one up just to discover the features, well, it has cost me that time. I think it's faster to read about the features instead of performing experiments to discover what they are.
For example, they don't say what types of membership they support. Can I make a closed, private, invitation only forum? What are the moderation features? What if I don't want "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" democratic moderation? As far as I can tell, I've got to create a forum and experiment to discover what it can and can't do.
Lots of stuff I don't really think I need in the forums I create/moderate. I'm not much interested in setting up some kind of social networking forum, which I think this is aimed at. The things I do are tightly focused and usually interesting to a very small group of people.
RSS sounds useful and embedded multimedia. I see from this page that YouTube is supported but I use blip.tv. Can I embed that? (Features page just hints at it.)
WYSIWUG ... excellent! But I don't see it here. Oh, now I found it (tiny blurry link on the upper-right). I think the WYSIWYG feature is reason enough to make me want to try this. (Why don't wikis like Wikipedia use WYSIWYG?)
Peace,
Rob:-]
