Re: signal-to-noise on d-d-l

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 12:35:52AM -0500 or thereabouts, Luis Villa wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 00:26, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > 
> > Desktop issues -> d-d-l. Global issues -> g-h. If we remove some of the
> > 'power' of d-d-l, then the "oddballs" won't feel like it's such a great
> > platform for their crack. 
> 
> Great, they'll move to g-h. That really solves the problem! :)

gnome-hackers has been very quiet recently. It would at least
solve the problem of clutter on d-d-l :) 

I think any project with multiple mailing lists has this problem.
And a major factor is inappropriate cross-posting. It is often
good to cross-post the initial email so that people are in the
loop. But then _say in the email_ which list you expect the 
discussion to go on. And set follow-ups :) 

This is actually in the Gnome Enhancement Procedure stuff, isn't
it? There's a bit about where discussion is to take place. 
Perhaps we should be doing that more on the lists in general?

There was a long long thread on d-d-l a while ago which was
also cross-posted, completely inappropriately, to gnome-list. 
No-one from gnome-list was taking part in the discussion,
going by the number of emails held for approval there, 
and the fact that none was directly "To: gnome-list". They
were just cc'd because no-one would remove it from the cc
line. "group-reply" (by whatever name) seems to account for
a lot of this.

I have never known whether it is part of a (gnome.org) 
list-admin's function to use the moderation queue as a place 
to discard off-topic posts. But it was very tempting to 
just silently lose all that thread, since it was going to
another two or three lists _and_ individuals who were 
already on at least one of them.

> PITA here, I think it's the right idea, I'm just totally at a loss as to
> how to do this other than saying '[you are|this thread is] a waste of
> time' which is awfully arbitrary and at least at the thread level has
> been spectacularly unsuccessful lately.

Perhaps it is because we have fairly nebulous guidelines?
The mailman info page says simply,

    "This list is for general GNOME Desktop Development issues."

Would some examples of specific threads or topics which are
or aren't on-topic help there? Perhaps even "this is not
on-topic here: it is more appropriate for.. (relevant-list-name)"?

Telsa



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