Re: Removal of debian usenet gateway
Tim Sailer asks:
> Is there a problem with them being gatewayed? I find them very useful
I think that there are problems with them being gatewayed.
In general, USENET has a low signal-to-noise ratio, and newsgroups
have much greater exposure and attract a less clueful kind of reader
and poster.
Bad consequences of distributing our mailing lists via USENET in
general include:
* Mail sent to developers by people who see their names in the
gatewayed lists. Developers should be spending their time
developing, not answering fan-mail, unless they want to.
* Spam sent to developers.
* Postings getting archived in places like Dejanews against the
authors' wishes.
* Increased traffic on debian-devel from less-than-useful people.
* Increased numbers of less-than-clueful developers (seriously).
This is not just my imagination:
I have been getting a fairly large number of messages recently sent to
`ian@chiark' which are little more than random requests for
assistance, which I have no time or inclination to deal with. I've
only recently started posting from that address again.
owner@bugs.debian.org has had confusing messages from people who saw
things sent to debian-bugs-dist and wanted more information.
Lars is complaining that his messages are being archived in Dejanews.
Even fixing the gateway not to strip X-No-Archive will not fix this,
because there will be archive sites that do not honour this.
Furthermore, it will defeat his spamtrap.
There seems to have been a much larger volume of postings from
nondevelopers to debian-devel lately, particularly on political
issues. I don't think this is helpful.
Think about it: if we really wanted USENET, why are we using
mailinglists ?
Therefore, all things considered I'd like the general gateway to be
shut off.
NB: I have no objection to _private_ gateways of these lists, for
closed user communities and with restricted distribution. I run
gateways of this kind for my own purposes, and would be happy to give
feeds to other developers or give them my software to run their own
gateway with.
However, I think we should forbid mail-to-news gateways where the
person running the gateway is not aware of _all_ the sites where the
news postings go, and also embargo the gatewayed lists from large
commercial news sites.
Christoph Lameter wrote:
> Just ask and the gateway will be gone. I did this because I thought
> this would be of benefit to the project. If you want to make Debian
> smaller and make it difficult for people to access information about
> the project then that is your problem.
In my capacity as a developer, I would like you to stop.
Ian.
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: