While the mailing list interface is nice for some people and has some advantages over forums, we have to weigh that against the effort and annoyance generated by spam. If we're going to force our moderators to continue to go through that effort and all the users to sift through the spam, we'd better be getting some value out of that. So far, no one has said "I will refuse to check the forum if you split them, and the forum users will suffer." This would be a fairly arrogant thing to say, but it's the only strong argument I can come up with for keeping them linked (or keeping the mailing list at all; if everyone important is on the forum then why have it?). And I would hope that anyone active who cares that much about this issue would see this thread and chime in on it. That said, I will refuse to check the forum if you split them, but that is entirely because the forum is unimportant to me (and as such, my continued presence there is not important to anyone).
