Re: We can halve volume by not allowing nondevelopers to post
Your entire argument depends on the unproven assertion that posts from
non-developers have no value. I have not seen you even attempt to
investigate this. The closest you came was that there were people
"apparently lacking in clues" that you "hope" are not developers.
Why not take the 5 seconds to check? The developers are all listed
in the developer keyring.
Ian Jackson wrote:
> However, there is an awful lot of posting, and posting begets more
> postings. Particularly, emotive issues like the one about
> `censorship' induce people to post whenever they have the smallest
> thing to say and each article begets more responses.
A quick count shows 9 mails from non-developers on that topic, out
of 52. I found those 9 mails to be not particularly lacking in clue.
> Reducing the traffic in -devel by a quarter to a third by excluding
> nondeveloper postings would IMO be a clearly good thing.
Excluding nondevelopers from debian-devel would be a bad thing. It
would be the first step to ossification.
> However, I think the effect would be even more dramatic, because of
> the effect that one posting generates more postings. If nondevelopers
> didn't post, we wouldn't have developers following up to them because
> they felt impelled to disagree.
Your bias is showing again. Did you consider that developers might
follow up to them because the topic was interesting? Note that right
now I'm following up to one of *your* postings because I felt impelled
to disagree.
Ian, you have plenty of experience with Usenet. You should know that
discussions about what should or should not be allowed in a newsgroup
are a primary source of noise. The thread you started is now almost
as large as the censorship one. I think it's going to win.
Richard Braakman
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