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From: Selena Deckelmann on 14 May 2010 15:15 On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Josh Berkus <josh(a)agliodbs.com> wrote: > Second, regarding advocacy: no, absolutely not. -advocacy is a working list > and not a virtual water cooler. +1. I would find it very difficult to manage having -advocacy thrown into -general. If folks think that information isn't getting wide enough distribution, that's one thing. But it is an important working group, even if there's not a ton of traffic all the time on it. -selena -- http://chesnok.com/daily - me -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers(a)postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
From: Bruce Momjian on 14 May 2010 16:18 Kevin Grittner wrote: > Tom Lane <tgl(a)sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > > I can't imagine that there's not going to need to be a "catchall" > > list for problems that don't fit into any of the subcategories. > > > > More generally, we already have most of the lists that you > > suggest, and we already know that people frequently don't find the > > most appropriate list for postings. I don't think getting rid of > > -general would help that in the least. The way to cut down on > > misposted traffic is to make the set of categories smaller and > > simpler, not to redouble our efforts to persuade people to use the > > same or even more categories. > > Well, redoubling our current efforts to direct people to more > specific lists would accomplish nothing, since doubling zero leaves > you with zero. The description of -general includes: > > | General discussion area for users. Apart from compile, acceptance > | test, and bug problems, most new users will probably only be > | interested in this mailing list > > Given that, the fact that -admin, -novice, -sql, and -performance > collectively get as many posts as -general suggests that people are, > in fact, making some effort to find a list which seems a good fit. > Perhaps if the description of -general was changed to suggest it > *was* a catch-all for posts which don't fit the other lists, things > would improve. FYI, I usually email new people privately that cross-posting a question can cause the question to be ignored. They usually respond positively and avoid it in the future. -- Bruce Momjian <bruce(a)momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers(a)postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
From: Greg Smith on 13 May 2010 23:39 Tom Lane wrote: > I can see the need for small tightly-focused special lists. How about a list devoted to discussions about reorganizing the lists? It would get plenty of traffic, and then I could not subscribe to that and have that many less messages to read. There is only one viable solution to reduce list traffic: ban forever everyone who top-posts or doesn't trim what they quote. Maybe some other old-school Usenet rules too--can we ban those with incorrectly formatted signatures and finally add proper bozo tagging? Praise Kibo. Seriously though, I file admin/general/performance into one user oriented folder, hackers/committers into a second, and all the non-code ones (advocacy, www, docs) into a third. I don't think there's any way to restructure those lists that will improve life for people who try to keep up with most of them. I was traveling yesterday and busy today, and now I'm 350 messages behind. No amount of rijiggering the lists will change the fact that there's just that much activity happening around PostgreSQL. You can move the messages around, but the same number are going to show up, and people who want to keep up with everything will have to cope with that. The best you can do is get better support in your mail program for wiping out whole threads at once, once you've realized you're not interested in them. The only real argument to keep some more targeted lists is for the benefit of the people who subscribe to them, not we the faithful, so that they can have something that isn't a firehose of messages to sort through. Is it helpful to novices that they can subscribe to a list when they won't be overwhelmed by traffic, and can ask questions without being too concerned about being harassed for being newbies? Probably. Are there enough people interesting in performance topics alone to justify a list targeted just to them? Certainly; I was only on that list for a long time before joining any of the others. Are the marketing oriented people subscribed only to advocacy and maybe announce happy to avoid the rest of the lists? You bet. Folding, say, performance or admin into general, one idea that pops up sometimes, doesn't help those people--now they can only get the firehose--and it doesn't help me, either. If you can keep up with general, whether or not the other lists are also included in that or not doesn't really matter. Ditto for hackers and the things you might try and split out of it. It's just going to end up with more cross posting, and the only thing I hate more than a mailbox full of messages is discovering a chunk of them are dupes because of that. I might like to see, for example, a user mailing list devoted strictly to replication/clustering work with PostgreSQL. That's another topic I think that people are going to want to ask about more in the near future without getting overwhelmed. But, again, that's for their benefit. I'll have to subscribe to that, too, and in reality it will probably increase the amount of messages I read, because people will ask stuff there that's already been covered on other lists, and vice-versa. -- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support greg(a)2ndQuadrant.com www.2ndQuadrant.us -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers(a)postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
From: Greg Stark on 14 May 2010 09:16 On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Greg Smith <greg(a)2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > Is it > helpful to novices that they can subscribe to a list when they won't be > overwhelmed by traffic, and can ask questions without being too concerned > about being harassed for being newbies? Probably. Only if they aren't hoping to get answers... What percentage of the hackers and experts who trawl -general for questions to answer are subscribed to -novices? -general isn't subscriber-only posts is it? > Are there enough people > interesting in performance topics alone to justify a list targeted just to > them? Certainly; I was only on that list for a long time before joining any > of the others. If they're interested in performance topics and they're not subscribed to -general then they're missing *most* of what they're interested in which doesn't take place on -performance. And most of what's on -performance ends up being non-performance related questions anyways. I think what I'm getting at is that we shouldn't have any lists for traffic which could reasonably happen on -general. If it's a usage question about postgres then it belongs in the same place regardless of what feature or aspect of the usage it is -- otherwise it'll always be some random subset of the relevant messages. This won't actually cut down on list traffic for me and Simon but it would help get people answers since they'll be posting to the same place as everyone else. > Are the marketing oriented people subscribed only to > advocacy and maybe announce happy to avoid the rest of the lists? You bet. Well yeah. This is an actual discernible distinction. As evidence I'llnote that there is no advocacy traffic on -general or other mailing lists. -- greg -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers(a)postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
From: "Marc G. Fournier" on 14 May 2010 09:39
On Fri, 14 May 2010, Greg Stark wrote: > On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Greg Smith <greg(a)2ndquadrant.com> wrote: >> Is it >> helpful to novices that they can subscribe to a list when they won't be >> overwhelmed by traffic, and can ask questions without being too concerned >> about being harassed for being newbies? �Probably. > > Only if they aren't hoping to get answers... What percentage of the > hackers and experts who trawl -general for questions to answer are > subscribed to -novices? > > -general isn't subscriber-only posts is it? All our lists are, yes ... *but* ... the 'subscriber list' is cross list, in that if you are subscribed to one, you can post to all ... > If they're interested in performance topics and they're not subscribed > to -general then they're missing *most* of what they're interested in > which doesn't take place on -performance. And most of what's on > -performance ends up being non-performance related questions anyways. And IMHO, that is as much a fault of the 'old timers' on the lists as the newbies ... if nobody redirects / loosely enforces the mandates of the various lists, newbies aren't going to learn to post to more appropriate ones ... Personally, my experience with large lists is that if there is a smaller, more focused list, I'll post there first, to avoid being lost in the noise .... and, I will re-post to a more general list *if* and only if I'm unable to get an answer from where I posted my original ... ---- Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Hosting Solutions S.A. scrappy(a)hub.org http://www.hub.org Yahoo:yscrappy Skype: hub.org ICQ:7615664 MSN:scrappy(a)hub.org -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers(a)postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers |