With respect I disagree. To me a mailing list serve a purpose. Its a middle ground between IRC and not having any discussion medium at all. IRC is suitable fo

With respect I disagree. To me a mailing list serve a purpose. Its a middle ground between IRC and not having any discussion medium at all. IRC is suitable for chat but discussions happen on mailing lists (or here on Hackernews). In mailing lists conversations are threaded and there's nothing wrong with carefully considering your response before the question flies off the screen as on an IRC chat. Stackoverflow is great for one-off questions, but they are not a support forum for your project. IMO new or young projects don't yet have a need for real discussion around the project, the project is to small, the Dev team is too small and or is located geographically close together, or the project just doesn't warrant in depth discussion yet. Edit: my biggest gripe about mailing lists is that many do not meet the one - click - unsubscribe standard, most that I've seen require two clicks. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it does matter to me.