splitting up the debian-user mailing list
I like the idea of splitting up the lists, but I would like to support
the suggestions of the following names:
debian-discusion: general discussions
debian-help: seek and you shall find
With a `novice' and a `user' group, I believe we will see
crosspostings, since novices, being exactly that, may not really know
the difference, and what should they do if there is no answer to a
query posted only to `novice'. But saying `discussion' and `help'
should be clear, even to a novice (and this is not to say anything bad
of novices, I has been one myself).
Also it will free the novices from having to decide when they have
"aged" enoough to move their questions to the `user' list.
The fewer the choices (three lists are most likely the limit) and the
smaller the overlap of overall technical content (ie. "do you need
help or are you just unsatisfied with dselect" or "is it X or mail")
as opposed to difficult qualities such "newbieness" or
"installation-typish".
One should also consider very seriously to provide some gentle
guidance to people making the three obvious mistakes of crossposting,
asking on the wrong list and using old subject lines without changing
them. If somebody is meant to read all messages anyway, they might as
well send a polite note making the poster aware of the mistake and
that it is in the mutual interest of everyone to keep this three
simple rules. They do this for instance on gnu.emacs.sources and I
think it is rather a success.
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Christian Lynbech | Computer Science Department, University of Aarhus
Office: R0.32 | Ny Munkegade, Building 540, DK-8000 Aarhus C
Phone: +45 8942 3218 | lynbech@daimi.aau.dk -- www.daimi.aau.dk/~lynbech
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
- petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
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