On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 03:51:44AM -0800, Hereon wrote:
> Request For Comment on:
> Enhancing the Debian mailing lists by:
> Creating debian-user-woody and debian-user-sarge mailing lists,
> and deactivating debian-user.
Bad idea. It's generally wrong to assume that more email lists will
result in better coverage. The more people subscribed to the
debian-user list, the more people there are to answer questions. If you
split the list, you're not guaranteed that you'll have an even
distribution of email across the new lists.
Because newbies don't give enough details in their emails to debian-user
is not a problem with too many subscribers, it's a problem of
information dissemination. They aren't paying attention to the
"welcome" message or the info on lists.debian.org.
By adding more lists, it will be confusing to users which one they
should subscribe to. There is already confusion around the idea of
"Which flavor of Debian to you use?" Why perpetuate this by making
newbies try to discern which email list they should belong to. "Join
debian-user," is simple, concise, and understandable.
Finding information on the list is subject to a good indexing
application. Some MUA's are very good with searching. You have the
mbox for each email list Debian hosts. Download the mbox, import it
into your client, and search.
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/
assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */
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