Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1998 03:09:07 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Tim Moony <timm@uniqsite.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Help! Upgrade 2.2.5-RELEASE to 2.2-STABLE. Message-ID: <8029.889873747@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 13 Mar 1998 21:22:25 PST." <Pine.BSF.3.96.980313211449.2092A-100000@uniqsite.com>
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> But mailing lists is neither organized nor complete: i.e., pieces of > goodies. Handbooks cannot cover everything. Well, that's what the archives are for. > So, please do not blame us newbies. Blame you for what? We only expect you to do your utmost to not overload the mailing list veterans if keeping the veterans around is something you're interested in doing (and you should be). In too many other projects you've seen the same phenomenon repeated over and over: 1. Mailing list A is a great place to talk to developers and get questions answered. 2. User population swells significantly and percentage of "how do I...?" questions goes up proportionately in mailing list A. 3. Developers, overloaded with work and deluged by email, unsubscribe from list A. 4. New users wind up asking questions of one other instead and misinformation or outright speculation begins to replace the informed answer. This has already happened irretrievably in many of Linux's formerly effective support media (like IRC's #linux channel and quite a few of their newsgroups) and the writing is on the wall for any OS group with a growing user population. The only known counter to this scenario is to somehow (and no, I don't know how we'd do it) get the new users trained early to be good with the search engines, the sources and what web based documentation there is in answering any questions which can be answered that way. Despite what one might think after observing the poor state of our docs (and you'll not hear anyone yelling louder about that than I), my long history of observing "newbies in the wild" has revealed that the great majority of problems comes from a simple _unwillingness to read the docs_. Newbies *don't want* to read the docs. Reading docs is boring! They'd much much rather go to someone in IRC or email and say "tell me what to do, dammit, I don't want to read no stinking docs!" and that's what eventually kills those media - they don't scale at high loads. Unfortunately, those media are currently about all we've got and so we're still faced with the short-term problem of too few people to answer questions, too little documentation and a whole boatload of newbies going "HELP!" in the mailing lists. Any suggestions as to how we might encourage the formation of more self-help movements in our user base would be welcomed before this problem starts becoming significantly more acute. Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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