On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 09:43 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote: > Chris Tyler wrote: > > > This list, fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx, is one of the first lists that most > > Fedora users join, and therefore quite important to the community. > > However, it's a high-volume list (and is sometimes perceived to have a > > high noise level), so many veterans of the Fedora community aren't > > subscribed. > > > > As the result of discussion at the last public (IRC) board meeting, it's > > been proposed that narrow the scope of this list a bit. The current > > description of this list simply reads: > > > > fedora-users: For users of Fedora > > > > The proposed replacement is: > > > > fedora-users: Help and support for using the Fedora distribution. > > > > Feedback on this proposed change is welcome. > > (1) I doubt if a change in the description of the list > will make any difference. > I for one long ago forgot the precise description, if I ever knew it. > > (2) I think the list works pretty well at present. > The majority of postings seem to me to deal with problems > that Fedora users have encountered. I think that's right. Having a better topic statement simply makes it easier for people to know when a discussion's off-topic, so they can have it elsewhere. Right now the statement is so general that it's difficult to know that. > (3) The only way of reducing postings to the list - > which seems to be the purpose of the exercise - > would be to moderate it in some way. > > In my experience, moderating a newsgroup or mailing list > involves a huge amount of time, > which in your (or Paul Field's) case I would have thought > would be better spent on something else. (note: Frields) :-) It's nice of you to be looking out for my time, and in all honesty I don't think I would have time to do true full-time moderation on a list with this much traffic. But I do check in on the list traffic from time to time just to see that folks are generally helping each other, in the spirit of the Fedora community. We want to gather a number of folks for this purpose because no one of us can do it all the time. > (4) Basically, the proposal seems to be > that the list should be censored in some way. > I am not against that in principle, > but I would like to know what would be disallowed. > Eg would references to livna be removed? Not our purpose *at all*. We just want to work with the existing fedora-list community to ensure that users who are seeking help, advice -- hey Chris, there's another word you might want to use! -- and tips aren't overrun by threads on the composition of Gethsemane cheese. (Note to cheese lovers: Nothing against that type of cheese, I have personally enjoyed it many times.) Having a topical list is less confusing to users. I think in general this list does quite a good job of keeping on topic, but since other parts of our community have been on the receiving end of complaints, it would be unfair to ignore them. Changing the topic makes it clearer to people what's on-topic for this list, and it's easier to point to when someone goes off the topic. I don't foresee changing the way people give advice. That's what the community's all about -- helping each other. If you want to suggest that someone uses a solution from livna or some other third party repository as a way of helping that person, that's your prerogative as a helpful fellow community member. > (5) The claim is that more experts would contribute to the list > if it were shorter. > I doubt if that is true; the reason experts do not contribute > is that they are doing other things, eg contributing to bugzillas. > > In my experience, there are enough knowledgeable people on the list > to give comprehensive answers to most queries. I'm not sure it's necessarily that the list is too high-volume in general, but that it's *perceived* to be high-volume because of a lot of off-topic chatter. I don't think that's a correct perception, but if we can help the perception by making sure the topic is clearer, that's a way of attracting more helpers on fedora-list. You're absolutely right that it might not help attract more experts, but it certainly couldn't hurt to clearly let users know what to expect on this list, could it? I don't take your statement to mean you don't want other helpers on this list, so if more people feel this is a good place to grow mutual support for using Fedora, I think you'd agree that's a worthy goal. -- Paul W. Frields gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://paul.frields.org/ - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
