Solution Coming Re: Fedora Community: Under threat?

[Eric Vought, Technical Director]

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|On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 02:00 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
|>Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium
|>for end-user support.  We need to steer end-users to an entirely
|>different medium in order to scale effectively.  Official project change
|>in that direction is happening soon.  Read the link above for details.
|>


|We have at least two problems: reduced participation and interest from
|developers, and the ability and interest to help USERS who, in their
|huge majority, do not have that "engineer" mentality nor any idea of how
|to use many other features of the Internet/Linux community that the
|veterans rely upon.

|Your solution ignores the users, particularly users who help others. A
|*very* important omission.

| <... Snipped ...>

|I am always pleased and happy to see Red Hat's concern for its users,
|and I have never met (virtually, even) a Red Hat employee whom I didn't
|respect and like. That is a Great Thing [tm]. In this case, however, I
|vehemently disagree with your proposed solution. I think it's horrible
|and will significantly harm the interactions of this community.

|I thought this was going to be a brief note, but hey... just say "no" >to
|web fora. Bad, bad idea.

|Cheers,

I spend a lot of time monitoring mailing lists of various kinds. Usenet
does not do everything right. In particular, Usenet feeds generate a
*lot* of traffic. Since I often connect via a 26.4 kbd modem link, I am
for any means to reduce traffic.

The wonderful thing about *good* web fora is that they provide a good
means for selecting what you want to read off line, such as email
subscription to subtopics/threads, getting just replies to your posts,
seeing just posts from a particular user, RSS support, etc. This means
that on a list with 1300 messages/day, I can see (and download) *five*
and then search the archives and read more when I have a faster link.
With Usenet, I have a great ability to read and sort messages off line,
*once I download them all*.

Bad web fora on the other hand means clicking on 35 links to see the 1
message you want to read. On a slow connection, it can take all day just
see if anyone has replied.

I prefer to read posts in my mail reader- that's what it is good at. The
~ problem is having the means to control what my mail reader sees. It
might to be good to look at a solution which is closer to a
"web-enhanced" mail list rather than a "web-forum" per se.

- --
- --------------
Eric Vought

Technical Director,
Diversity Ink
Morgan Family Enterprises
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