This has been tried a number of times. I'ts been a couple of years since I last saw one, but multiple people have set up forums, either mirrored or not. They have all died because of either lack of usage or because the person who did it disappeared.
Mostly, because they did not work well and the folks on this end of the process had to do more work to get the information necessary to answer the question. I know I eventually stopped responding to the questions from those sources because it was difficult to follow the information flow. Namely you had to crawl back up to the forum to get information and then the email thread had mix of information that made it through on its own and some subset of information that dedicated people pulled in from the forum. That mix depended on dedication level and time available.
Most likely things like that yes -- which indicates that it really wasn't enough people who preferred that format to actually reach critical mass.
