As anyone who's subscribed to both lists is (painfully) well-aware, there 
are many, many differences between the following two lists:

  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Of course, there's some partial overlap in the membership of both lists -- 
for example, many key developers are also on the user list -- but for the 
most part they're two different communities:

  200+ folks on abiword-dev
  ~400 folks on abiword-user

Those differences are, by and large, a very Good Thing.  

We're high-traffic on this list, and willing to go as deep as needed on any 
technical detail, no matter where it is (or isn't yet) in the code.  We're 
determined to figure out how to make all kinds of stuff Just Work, with an 
especially strong focus on those features that someone's ready and willing 
to step up and implement now.  

By contrast, traffic on the user list is much lighter, and tends to focus on 
much more pragmatic issues.  Those folks all *use* AbiWord, and are swapping 
tips and ideas on how they can help each other use it even better.  They're 
focused on the experience of *using* our software instead of creating it, 
which is a tremendously valuable perspective for us.  Plus which, they're 
almost unfailingly positive when they make suggestions -- many of which are 
very well-thought-out and clearly explained.  

Thus, I was especially gratified to find the following thread spawned 
yesterday on the user list:

  http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-user/01/May/0015.html

There's not a lot there yet, but it's been really nice to see how productive 
a discussion they're having.  I encourage anyone who needs a break from our 
current hot-and-heavy debates here to go over and read up on how some of our 
*existing* users approach these issues. 

However, before you do so, one simple request.  

Please, please, please resist the temptation to migrate any of our existing 
discussions from this list to the user list.  As we've proven already, 
there's already more than enough hot-and-heavy advocacy going on here.  :-)
Polluting their discussion would be a terrible thing, because what we really 
want are *their* unbiased and unfiltered opinions.  

Enjoy!

Paul

PS:  My secret hope is that while everyone's off reading what real users 
think, I can get caught up on all our open "topic" threads and see whether I 
have anything to add.  ;-)

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