The biggest seems to be Stack Exchange: don’t like that because it’s totalitarian and only handles precise questions with specific answers.
Next is IRC which is great except you’ve got everybody in one big room all talking over each other and it keeps interrupting you because it is realtime and not offline.
Mailing lists seem to be full of good programmers but I don’t really like the way everything is delivered to you to be stored locally and there’s no distinction between conversations you are involved in and the rest. On a busy mailing list that is a big problem. This seems to just be an interface problem so maybe there is a good client for mailing lists out there?
Then there’s newsgroups. My ISP doesn’t provide newsgroup servers any more so I have to pay to access these now. And aren’t they all full of spam?
Lastly you have normal forums which are my favorite in terms of their interface but seem to be full of novices now. Is there a web forum for programmers who want to discuss design, methodology, programming language design, computer science, etc.? Or has that era of the Internet ended now?
