I choose to review H-OIEAHC, a discussion community on h-net that is dedicated to Early Colonial American Culture. H-net is an “international consortium of scholars in the humanities and social sciences” which sponsors a number of scholarly discussion communities.
This community is sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, which publishes William and Mary Quarterly; so it is affiliated with a scholarly journal.
The editor of the list is John Saillant, who was only identified in H-OIEAHC as with Western Michigan University, with no reference to his position there. After a web search, I found out he was Associate Professor of English and History, affiliated with the Omohundro Institute and quite a prolific author whose books include, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes. 1753-1833.
I could not find out when this list was created, but the logs go back to July 1993. The list has been very active since its inception, with about 50 postings a month for the first few years growing to about 100 postings a month in 2004 (although in fairness I have no other community to compare this to, but to me that sounds like a lot of postings). About 60% of the postings are from email addresses ending in .edu, so one can assume that these people are academics. But even among the .coms, .orgs, & .nets, once the posting is opened, many of the authors include in their signatures an affiliation with a university; overall, I would estimate that about 80% have some affiliation with a university. So the vast majority of the posters are academic professionals, most of whom appear to be professors or graduate students.
The postings are about a wide variety of subjects. About half the postings are teaching- or research-related, as they ask for sources on a particular topic, suggestions for reading lists for classes, information on fellowships or teaching positions, or include thoughts about books that someone liked or disliked. Other postings are more difficult to quantify, as they are more abstract in nature, but all postings seem to be professional, academic, and serious, no spamming here. There was a very interesting discussion about the Gilder & Lehrman Fellowships which started off with the posting: “Are Gilder and Lehrman tilting American history to the right?” This thread went on for several months, with many people weighing in from all sides. Some argued that Gilder & Lehrman were indeed skewing history, others argued for a free market system where anyone can sponsor a fellowship, while others argued that academia has long been a stronghold of the leftist liberals, and a little conservatism could be good for the system.
Overall, I found this to be a very active community of scholars keeping each other up to date on conferences and jobs, giving each other advice on which books to use for classes or where to find information, and generally discussing the state of scholarship in early colonial history.