>>51
I don't know, many forums have Gnus interfaces, and this website has sbbs.el for example. It might just be a matter of having stable APIs and decent abstractions to make writing the interface relatively painless. Of course these APIs have their own problems in terms of requiring serialization and parsing of inefficiently encoded information which lacks request granularity, meaning you end up downloading a ton of stuff you don't need in a format which requires work to access, but this is another issue.