Critique and Advice; the treadmill of adventuring.

A carefully thought out and edited work, or a work slapped together with reader suggestions on an update by update schedule?

but a forum adventure is not carefully thought out. pretending it is such as fraud.

That's a little combative and, I think, pretty inaccurate. There were and are lots of works that are hugely preplanned, sometimes to the point that readers get frustrated at the "railroading". It's not the fashion here on ET, but I have my doubts there aren't any currently running (or even since-abandoned) works that had a lot of thought and editing put into them. I mean, Fortuna still functionally acts as a forum adventure, but there's a lot of concept artwork, worldbuilding (or worldbuilding synthesis), overarching plot, and design and polish that go on behind the scenes, even though it's still (I think? I haven't been part of the Fortuna community in many an age) partially-to-largely extemporaneously created.

As for the overall question of forum versus mirror, my own preference is for the forum. It's not hard except in the most egregious outliers to find the actual updates if I don't feel like reading feedback and suggestions, but the option to read them exists if I do. Also, I don't like having to go to different sites to read them, because I am a lazy curmudgeon.