On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:49:23 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers <dag@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, D. D. Brierton wrote: > > > I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the > > mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this > > mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at > > the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers > > regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh > > and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're > > lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE. > > A good email-client may help you cope with the volume. Threading is a > must. > > The fedora mailinglist has become a general forum for all things Fedora > (except development and testing related items, which have their own > mailinglists). It makes sense that most of the developers are on > fedora-test and fedora-devel, rather than on this list. > > It is a normal evolution with any project to move from a single to many > mailinglists. It is not a threat, it makes things more viable. I've thought about suggesting that the list be split into multiple mailing lists. Like, perhaps fedora-help and fedora-community. fedora-help could be used by people who are having a problem, and fedora-community could have the flame wars, and the slightly OT threads such as "What is your favorite..." "Why do we (do|not do) it this way..." etc. Thoughts on the idea? The fundamental problem with multiple lists seems to get people to use the correct mailing list for their issue. There are already several RedHat mailing lists available, but some seem to not get as used as this one. For example, the AMD64 list gets almost no traffic. And how many threads are here about AMD64? They aren't out of place, since they are Fedora related, but it seems so few know about the other list. There is also fedora-selinux for selinux issues, but I don't subscribe to it so I don't know what kind of volume they get. One of the big problems with list volume seems to be that most people seem to not search the archives, which I understand. I don't generally want to search the archives when someone can probably answer my question easily, but it would greatly reduce the list volume if people just did that instead of posting a question that has been beaten to death already. Something that might be good is to have an etiquette page and an official list FAQ page that people had to look at during the subscribe process. I don't know if anyone would actually read these, but it might be worth a shot. This could be very helpful for new people and potentially reduce redundant or flame-provoking posts. I agree that the list volume is way too large to keep up with everything. I have learned a lot from this list and have tried to contribute where I can, but it can take up way too much time. In an effort to help with this, I created a filter that looks for emails with areas of knowledge/interest mentioned in them and adds them to a seperate label. That has helped some, but even that selection gets several threads each day. These were just some thoughts I've had on the topic. Jonathan
