Re: Wishing for an off-topic mail list with debian-user participants (or most of them)
On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 12:51:24AM -0700, Weaver wrote:
Do you really think it's that bad?
Yes.
I can remember back when I would wake up in the morning to have over 300
list messages on screen.
And, many of those were Off-Topic but, usually, people were reasonably
active in labelling them as such.
I don't think labelling helps people who are not experienced with
mailing lists and so can interpret threads and suchlike properly,
which is the audience I want to help.
On the other hand, the majority, as it is now, would be on topic.
It doesn't *feel* to me that the majority are on topic now, but I
haven't sat down and classified a sample to truly find out.
And, further, those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to
repeat it.
We've had an off-topic mailing list in the past.
I actually signed up for it and spent a little time there.
It was a ghost town.
It simply didn't work.
Yes it didn't work, that's my impression too. So I agree with you at
least as far it would not be worth doing the exact same thing again.
One thing that wasn't done last time (or really, at any time) was
to enforce the mailing list rules more strictly. Therefore there was
no incentive for people to bother using the second list. Perhaps
stronger enforcement of the rules is needed. In which case, having a
more relaxed list where off-topic wasn't a problem might be a more
attractive proposition.
The proper place to have a discussion about whether or not the rules
should be enforced is, of course, not here: so I will do so elsewhere.
Lest it seem that I am totally "down" on the community that does exist
on -user: I think there's value in fact that a group of people with a
shared interest enjoy discussing all matter of other things. I don't
want that destroyed. I'd like to see how it might better co-exist with
the user-support aspect of the mailing list. But I might be tilting at
windmills here. There's a reason that almost no other Debian developers
engage with this list, despite them all being, almost by definition,
Debian users.
--
Please do not CC me for listmail.
👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ jmtd@debian.org
🔗 https://jmtd.net
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