Dear Jena developers,
Upon Andy Seaborne’s suggestion, I would like to share with you a
concern we have with certain posts shared on [email protected].
In the last couple months, we have seen certain users repeatedly sending
questions that are either:
* hardly related to Jena and Fuseki
* very basic questions about RDF or SPARQL
* betraying the lack of common knowledge in Java programming and
coding good practice in general
What’s worse, these users, in spite of repeated remarks, keep on being
very vague in their questions, requiring the most patient subscribers to
ask many questions just to obtain a decent understanding of the problem.
A problem that is, again, often not much related to Jena or Fuseki.
As a subscriber, I’m tired of their consistent failure to propose clear
and concise questions and I wish the patient people who answer them
spend their mailing time on more interesting threads. I also fear it
makes certain subscribers silently go away because of this “noise”.
I first thought of publicly complaining to these users, but I thought
that the managers of the Jena lists should discuss it and take the
appropriate measures.
My suggestion is to:
* inform the subscribers of an upcoming enforcement of the publishing
rules (relevance, clearness, completeness, etc.)
* stop answering the vague/off-topic/badly presented questions
* if they insist, remind them the topic of the list and good practices
in problem reporting, and warn them of a possible ban.
Thanks for your attention,
Colin Maudry
https://twitter.com/CMaudry
