Narayanaras,
As a part of the LibreOffice Drupal website scope that was developed
about a month ago we are tackling this issue head on. The Drupal
website team believes we can keep all parties happy by using Drupal
forums, which brings with it all of the benefits you have mentioned as
well as supporting rich text, while allowing legacy support for
mailing lists which will keep the people who are still on dialup or
mobile users happy.
The Steering Committee has given us ~6 months to implement the system,
so sorry about the wait, but we don't want to disrupt the systems that
the OOo community has worked off for many years, we want to improve
them and the systems around them without losing functionality or
members.
If you have an interest in this and some past experience with setting
up or administering systems like this you are welcome to join the
Drupal website team and give us a hand to implement this faster than
scheduled.
Thanks,
Michael Wheatland