Date: Sat, 28 Mar 1998 18:36:55 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Ben Ostrowsky <sylvar@afn.org>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Rant: What are we? Message-ID: <19980328183655.26375@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.A32.3.95.980327235507.179993A-100000@freenet2.afn.org>; from Ben Ostrowsky on Sat, Mar 28, 1998 at 12:04:05AM -0500 References: <19980328142134.33048@welearn.com.au> <Pine.A32.3.95.980327235507.179993A-100000@freenet2.afn.org>
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On Sat, 28 March 1998 at 0:04:05 -0500, Ben Ostrowsky wrote: >> As it turns out, that decision has been good for everyone. > > Please speak for yourself, Sue. I'm one of a dozen people who have > expressed their interest in newbie questions, and there are probably > several dozen subscribers who have not yet told you of their interest. OK, maybe it's time for me to say a word. Sue has told you some of the history that went into setting up this mailing list. Here's a little more, coloured by my personal viewpoint. For a long time, we have had three "general" FreeBSD lists: 1. -hackers, for heavy technical discussion. 2. -questions, for questions on how to use FreeBSD. 3. -chat, for general discussion. Even with these three, we have had difficulties deciding which list to use. -hackers and -questions are the largest lists (each a little under 1000 people), and the subject matter overlaps. Where do you send a detailed technical question, for example? What we've tried to do is to draw the line between -questions and -hackers roughly along the distinction between system administration and programming. But not everybody agrees with that distinction, not everybody sticks to it. What can we do? I send out reminders every time I answer that kind of message, I send out a "How to get best results" once a week. Still people get confused, or they can't be bothered, and some even think it's worth flaming me for. One of the reasons they get confused is that many of them are newbies. Does that mean they should be relegated to a different mailing list? I don't personally think so. I don't think that newbies should use hackers to ask "I have a PPP connection now, but why doesn't Netscrape work?", but even though this sort of thing happens twice a week on -questions, I can't see much advantage in having it happen twice a week on two different mailing lists: many more people benefit from the answers on -questions than just the person who asked the question. So why do we need a fourth list? Sue thinks that many *real* newbies are a little intimidated by the activity on -questions, and that they would benefit from a different kind of discussion. Some of the answers that have gone by since the mailing list started are indicative of this. On the other hand, it would be nice to think that these real newcomers will quickly become more adept. This would make -newbies more like a reception area than a mailing list. Then there's the concept of "Auntie Sue's tea room". Maybe a bit of the flavour of IRC (I'm guessing; I've never used IRC). That's more like -chat, and maybe there's something going for it. The -chat newsgroup is frequented by the same people as on -hackers, people who have known each other for years and have a long-standing relationship with UNIX. While there's no eligibility criterion for -chat, most newbies would find it uninteresting. I'm not convinced by any of these arguments, but I thought that the idea was worthwhile enough that we should give it a try. Sue may have got the feeling that this meant "stay in your place or we'll close the list again", but that's not the way the FreeBSD project does things. It would be nice, though, for people to have a good idea of what list to use when, and having -newbies complicates that issue. If people start asking questions on -newbies, for example, there's a good chance that those who no longer think of themselves as newbies will ask *their* questions on -hackers, and -questions would die out. That in itself isn't such a bad idea. What we would then have would be a new -questions called -newbies. The name would make a better distinction from -hackers. On the other hand, the hackers are already complaining about too much volume, so the next step might be a dilution of -hackers. As you can see, it's not an easy distinction. Sue had hoped that the heavies would keep off -newbies, or at least not post any messages, but that hasn't quite happened. From what I've seen, there are a number of people active on the list who are quite experienced. This may not be a bad idea: I was the person who was concerned that questions on -newbies would give rise to a lot of misleading or just downright wrong answers. But whichever way we look at it, there's a differentiation problem. Any comments? I personally think we need to let the group develop a bit, and then we'll be able to decide. Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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