Mailing-list Gudelines. Yes or No

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Frank Murphy wrote:
> Though a newbie, 
> 
> Have grown to love Fedora because of it's willing to lead with new
> "technology". 
> Have contacted you as  the User-list owners. (cc the list)
> 
> But like any organisation public\private wahtever, some guidelines are
> necessary otherwise nothing gets done. In this case
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
> 
> Coming from windows I understand some of the *workflow habits*
> But learned.
> 
> You are possible going to lose a number of seasoned user
> troubleshooters, if mailing list guidelines continue to be pushed back
> in peoples faces, for attempting to do the correct thing.
> 
> 
> Maybe once and for all decide does the list need guidelines, Yes or No?
> 
> Frank
> 
> 
Yes, it needs guidelines. Otherwise you end up with messages like
the one that started the discussion this time - a brief message is
reply to the digest, quoting the entire digest, with no clue as to
what message was being replied to.

The debate is more what to do about it. Do you point out the
problem, or do you ignore all messages from the poster. Maybe give
one warning, and put them in the kill file if they ignore it?

A good example of what happens when people are unwilling to follow
the guidelines is what happened on the Mandriva lists a few years
back. There was a newbie list, and an expert list. The most of the
people that had providing answers on the newbie list got tired of
people that were unwilling to follow the list guidelines, and left
the newbie list. In short order, you could not get help with
problems on the newbie list, and newbies started asking questions on
the expert list. The problem was that they got expert level answers
instead of newbie level answers, and unless someone took pity on
them, they had a hard time using the help they were given. (It was
the expert list, after all.)

This list has already driven away some of the more helpful people,
and is in the process of driving away more. I have also noticed that
a fair number of people have been limiting their help to people that
follow the guidelines, and also have interesting questions.

As for myself, I have cut way back on answering questions, and I am
more likely to point out where they can find the answers for
themselves they to give them the answer. Unless a question really
peeks my interest, I am not going to do much research to find the
answer when I don't have it at the top of my head, but I know where
to look for it. As for giving the background behind the answers,
most of the time I don't bother any more.

Maybe after doing this for over 10 years, I am just getting burned
out...

Mikkel
-- 
I haven't lost my mind. It's around here...somewhere.

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