coi {hi}
The general rule has been for this board to only be in Lojban, but I have a few things to say about that, and due to the nature of this topic, we may approach this thread as a temporary lapse into English.
Hi and welcome to jbotcan.
Your idea seems reasonable to me.
1) The mailing list is certainly over kill for trivial topics and reactive replies.
2) Lack of anonymity might put people off.
I like anonymous boards for a few reasons (elaborated by Shii here: http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan).
jbotcan is really slow. I think this is because the Lojban community is so small, people who can speak it fairly well are not many, and many people simply might not be interested in posting or are just too busy to be regulars. It's hard to get real interesting topics going when you can barely form full sentences. This goes against my original idea, which was complete immersion. But having little to talk about, or receiving little interest in what you do say, makes it difficult.
For these reasons of slowness, I think allowing English (or whatever)-language discussion on jbotcan might be a good idea. The new main point, then, will be that the board is about Lojban and people can speak Lojban, as opposed to “people only speak Lojban”. The idea was novel but the board is pretty inactive, I think, as a result. (Don't get me wrong, there are regular people who view this board daily, judging from the site statistics, but not a lot of content due to the aforementioned reasons.)
rodo pensi mo {what does everyone think?}