Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 5th Dec 2008 21:20 UTC, submitted by AdamW
Controversy in the Mandriva world this afternoon. Vincent Danen is all doom and gloom, citing declining numbers of posts to mailing lists as evidence of a shrinking community. However, Javier Villacampa points out in the comments that the community is spreading out to different places, and Adam Williamson responds to Vincent, citing fast-growing numbers of users and posts on the official forums.
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RE: mailing lists - wtf??
by sbergman27 on Sat 6th Dec 2008 16:16
in reply to "mailing lists - wtf??"
Member since:2005-07-24
Other thing is - but that is only my subjective feeling - that there seem to be much more redundant questions on mailing lists because most of them are a pain to search.
Ooooooh, have you hit on a pet peeve of mine, there!
Mailing list archives without a built in search, that only give you that silly default view where you can click the month and tell it whether you want to see the month's posts by Date, Name, or Thread. Which don't even bother to provide a link to a third party site that does the list maintainer's job for him by indexing the list and providing basic search capability. And which furthermore has wise-ass regular posters standing by, ready to scold and humiliate, on a moment's notice, any poor newbie who happens to ask a FAQ.
I think things have gotten a *little* better. But there was a time when the above paragraph described most of the extant FOSS mailing lists.
Gets me worked up just thinking about it! ;-)
Edited 2008-12-06 16:17 UTC
RE[2]: mailing lists - wtf??
by Earl Colby pottinger on Sat 6th Dec 2008 16:33
in reply to "RE: mailing lists - wtf??"
Member since:2005-07-06
Hech, I will supply my own search software.
Just give me a means to download the entire mailing list and I will do my data mining.
I find it a pain that the OS listings that I read gives me no options to reset the pointer to the very start and have every single post send/download to me.
If anyone knows how to do this with Free-Lists ( http://www.freelists.org/ ) please post how.
Edited 2008-12-06 16:35 UTC
RE[2]: mailing lists - wtf??
by IanSVT on Mon 8th Dec 2008 02:53
in reply to "RE: mailing lists - wtf??"
Member since:2005-07-06
RE[2]: mailing lists - wtf??
by Soulbender on Mon 8th Dec 2008 15:08
in reply to "RE: mailing lists - wtf??"
Member since:2005-08-18
Mailing list archives without a built in search, that only give you that silly default view where you can click the month and tell it whether you want to see the month's posts by Date, Name, or Thread.
GNU Mailman, how I loathe thee.
The number of times I've given up on trying to find an answer to some questions after being greeted by some damn Mailman archive without search is uncountable.
Here's a tip: i dont have fscking time to wade through 5 years and thousands of post to find the answer.
Seriously, if it's 2008 and there's no good search for your mailinglist archive, give up.
Member since:
2007-08-03
I'd say counting posts on mailing lists is fundamentally flawed for various reasons:
Back in the old days mailing lists where the place to go - that is done by forums now.
Linux got a lot easier to install.
There is a lot of info out there - usually you find a fix thru a searchengine without posting anything anywhere.
It's also a lot faster than waiting for someone to answer a post.
Plus some mailing list are notorious for flamefests that take up about half the posts there.
Other thing is - but that is only my subjective feeling - that there seem to be much more redundant questions on mailing lists because most of them are a pain to search.
Normally the only people that post on mailing lists anymore are those that need a fix for a very specific problem and take it to a specialized list for an app/distro where there is no forum around and no fix to find otherwise.
Edited 2008-12-06 13:57 UTC