On Monday March 3 2008 21:52:04 Dan Kegel wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI
>
> <renaud@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Mailing list now getting clogged up with beginners questions.
> >
> > For me that's it, I'm leaving, and you'll have to find new maintainers
> > for the apps I maintained.
>
> Hmm. That's two people who are upset by the
> increase in newbie questions.
>
> I'm starting to think that perhaps we do need
> to map the existing forum to a wine-users-newbies list.
I disagree. I can agree with idea to split up the list only if number of
messages per day will be big (but currently it is small).
If we decide in the future to split up the list, we shouldn't try to
separate "advanced" users and "newbies" (it was already explained recently by
someone why this is pointless). What should be done in such case is to
separate discussions by topic (each topic will have its own list and proper
forum link if the list is intended for typical users or no link at all if it
isn't - wine-devel is good example of such list). But currently we have too
small number of messages per day, so there is no need to split up, really.
* * *
Personally I don't understand these people. It is quite easy to skip messages
or topics if you don't want to read them (or even use filters like Alan)...
In fact this is how I read wine-bugs (it should be noted that I have very
little free time) - if I see a message that might be useful for me I read it
or skip it otherwise.
Number of mail per day in wine-users is quite small, and people who maintain
application(s) should be either interested in *some* newbie's questions who
ask something related to programs they maintain or they should be interested
in general user questions (if they are not why they are subscribed to this
list?). Anyway, skipping newbie questions from the forum will take at worst
1-3 minutes of *additional* time per day (or even almost a zero if you filter
all messages from the forum) - I don't believe this is a problem for someone
who want to *help* users at this list. And as we can see, all people who help
users *actively* either like forum <-> mailing list link or at least agree
that it is useful thing. It is obvious that this is good for WINE Project
because by having a forum and supporting users there we are becoming more
user-friendly. And if we are becoming more user-friendly, we will have more
users and therefore more popularity; in "long run" that means more
developers, bug-reporters, maintainers, etc.
Anyway, I think it is obvious that wine-users list does exist for *users* who
need help (and whose questions aren't suitable for wine-devel) and for people
who want to *help* such users (of course there is some people who just read
the list or major part of its messages without helping anyone - "just for
fun", and either don't post at all or post very rarely).
BTW, by definition, most users of WINE are newbies. For advanced
questions/discussions (and not general user questions) we already have
wine-devel list.
> I think that amount of segmentation might in fact
> be useful.
> - Dan
Current traffic (for wine-users) is small. So personally I don't see any
reason to create another list (especially just because of one or two people
who write messages rarely and even more rarely actually helped users at this
list in the past). Even if at some point in the future number of messages
will be very big in this list, we may want create different lists for
different topics (and link them with the forum accordingly) and leave
wine-users for general questions/discussions.
In other words, it is better separate discussions by topic than to blindly
separate users by "type" ("newbie" or "advanced"). But currently there is no
need to create more lists than we already have (IMO).
BTW, we already have such system: wine-users, wine-patches, wine-bugs,
wine-announce, wine-releases, wine-tests, wine-cvs, wine-tests and
wine-devel lists dedicated to completely different topics. It is easy to see
how this approach can effectively sort all messages by topic (and give the
ability to subscribers to choose what they want to receive to inbox).
