List protocol (was Re: 'The man who wants to take your jobs')

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Sunday 28 March 2004 10:10 am, Zack Cerza wrote:
> I posted to the thread sometime in the middle, but I've long since bored of
> it. I'm not going to talk about whether *I* think it's on- or off-topic
> here, but I do want to point something out.
>
> On debian-devel, it's not uncommon to have a thread reach 100 or so posts -
> many times longer than this one. And it's all ON-topic. My point? Sometimes
> you have to sit through reams of mail you have no interested by virtue of
> the fact that you're subscribed to the list. This one isn't that bad,
> really.

I will voice my concern and then bow to the will of the majority.

I run mailing list.  Lots of mailing lists.  What I see all to often is that 
long mostly-off-topic threads tend to scare away new list members and 
lurkers.  They either don't post when they have a question, unsubscribe 
because the topic bothers them, or unsubscribe because now they're getting 
more emails a day than they can handle.

The thing I like most about BLU, and the attribute I push first when trying to 
get someone to join, is that the smarties on this list are friendly to users 
on all levels, and will gladly suffer newbie questions in the name of 
spreading the faith and aiding our peeps.  That, and we like distributing 
fishing poles more than fish.  Part of making this list casual-user/newbie 
friendly is not flooding it with non-relevant posts, however interesting.                                           

Everyone knows I was unemployed for about a year and a half.  Through very 
hard work and networking, I now have just about as much consulting work as I 
can handle and still get a solid five hours sleep a night.  But I am still 
very active in the cause.  I host http://www.bostongeeks.com, am helping on 
the development of http://www.windnetworking.net, host the biztalk mailing 
list (mostly for this purpose- to keep other lists clean), and stay on all 
the unemployment mailing lists just so I can forward relevant jobs to those 
in need.

Both my current and previous contracts, as well as two jobs ago, use 
consultants in India.  I wish I could present to Management an accounting of 
the time and resources we've lost debugging their code, rewriting their code, 
refactoring their code because they wrote it based on old source code from 
the US team, and how much time we've been held back by them handing in too 
little too late.  I'm still very affected by this issue, and love to talk 
about it.

But this isn't the place.

Do what you will.  I've said my peace.

-- 
DDDD   
DK KD  An optimist thinks the glass is half full.
DKK D  A pessimist thinks a glass is half empty.
DK KD  The software engineer thinks the glass is twice as big
DDDD   as it needs to be.                         Colin Walls