I prefer forums myself because they can have good archive support.
But having been involved with OSS development for a long time I'm very
aware that most core developers prefer to deal with email and simply use
good (or at least familiar) tools to manage the complexity.
I'm fairly certain the reason forums are refused by many is because each
one has a different interface and when you're dealing with as many as a
dozen or two lists the prospect of using a different UI for each one is
appalling.
But just because there is a mailing list doesn't mean you can't have a
forum-style web interface. There are several web services that turn
public mailing lists into web forums. Nabble, Mail-archive, and
MarkMail cover many lists including ivy-user.
http://www.nabble.com/ivy-user-f18383.html
http://markmail.org/browse/org.apache.ant.ivy-user
As for the email account home/work problem, just get a GMail account for
that purpose and that will turn any mailing list into a web forum.
Jim
Paul Newport wrote:
Looking through the mail archive, there was a thread asking for a
forum instead of a mailing list.
I've started looking at IVY recently and have had to subscribe at work
with my work email address, and at home with my home one, which is
somewhat frustrating.
Mailing lists may have been OK years ago, but I seriously believe you
are shooting yourselves in the foot by having a mailing list instead
of forum. Look at the forum used by the Spring Project, or the JBoss
crew, highly active, loads of users and traffic, easy to search, can
log in whether at home or at work.
Also some people's work IT managers like to monitor email traffic
(don't you love 'em) and frown upon constant emails coming in from a
mailing list.
