On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Damian Donnelly wrote: >I think moderating this list, as suggested, is a good idea. The >amount of abuse (personal opinion and nit-picking) of this >mailing list today has almost convinced me to unsuscribe. > >Pull yourselves together. I agree with your second sentence completely. It's tiring to read the same old repeated tirades day in and day out, especially on a list like fedora-devel which is supposed to be strictly about development. I know many people have commented both internally at Red Hat and externally along the general idea of "whoa, there's so much crap coming in it's hard to sift the useful interesting stuff and on topic stuff from all the rants and raves and garbage" and similar. I agree, I can't keep up with it all, so I sift looking for "XFree86" in people's subjects, skip over subjects that are obvious neverending flamewars and pointless ranting, and try to find useful mails to reply to. It's such a pileup of mostly total garbage though, so as to make the signal level very low compared to the noise. I might move the list out of my pine search path into my archive path, just to avoid the volume of what is mostly pointless garbage and bitching. ;o) The other alternatives at least for me are to: 1) Set a procmail filter to delete anything without XFree86 or other special keywords in the subject 2) Unsubscribe Moderation would be nice in theory, but there's 2 problems with that: 1) People would scream bloody murder 10 times more and claim Red Hat is an evil closed blah blah for having a moderated list and their freedom of speech is being withheld and censored, blah blah blah. So that would never ever work out, if anything it would generate 2 times as much useless off topic junkmail. and 2) Someone would have to moderate each post. That would be more or less a full time job, and if the purpose of it was to kill off topic and/or totally useless threads, most of the list traffic would almost completely vanish IMHO, making the list pretty quiet. ;o) So, I think people want the lists open, thats fine, but then people get what they get, which at least currently is cacophony on fedora-devel-list, fedora-test-list, and fedora-list all 3 lists of which are almost indistinguishable from one another contentwise. I wonder if they'd make good bayesian filter data for spamassassin though. ;o) Anyway, that's my $0.03 CDN. ;oP -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
