Hi Everyone, Based on the replies we've received in regards to our decision to partition the DOTNET list (some of which have been sent privately), I thought I'd post a little information on the history & motiviations of the decision, as well as a few replies to specific comments people have made (in FAQ format)...
* Who was involved in the decision? Everyone at DM participated in the debate about what to do based on feedback we received from our own DM instructor, students, Microsoft dev leads & PMs, current list subscribers, and former list subscribers whose contributions were valued. This discussion was a long, intense debate that spanned at least 3 months. After weighing all of the feedback, and realizing that no one decision is perfect, we arrived at this decision; which we felt was (all things considered) the best option. * Why was the list split? The key issue is degradation due to increased *on-topic* traffic, not off-topic traffic. Certainly, this list (like any other) suffers from occassional off-topic posts, which I'll address separately below. - Degradation due to increased on-topic posts. This is the form of the degradation that worried us the most - primarily because it has resulted in the list losing subscribers that previously contributed to the list in a valuable fashion, but that have since left the list due to the traffic volume. These people include DM instructors, Microsoft devs & PMs, and numerous other individuals that previously contributed in a valuable manner; but that left the list due to increased traffic. Brad hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that the quality of the list is a function of the participants, and not the list host. Unfortunately, we've seen valuable contributors leave the list due to the increased traffic. That indicator carried a lot of weight in the decision making process. As just one example, one of the things that made this list so valuable in the early days was the contribution of members of the various .NET development teams. This list was effectively a direct pipeline into those teams. Participants could pose questions or bug notes and get replies directly from the dev in charge of that area. But as traffic has soard, MSFT involvement has diminished. Please note that Microsoft's involvement isn't the only involvement we're interested in - it's just a typical example of something we've seen and heard about from many people we come into contact with at conferences, in classes, and through email. By partitioning the list into more focused communities, we hope to encourage those wayward participants to rejoin and further increase the value of the list to the entire subscriber base. For their part, Microsoft has committed to rejoining our new communities as active contributors under the new split. We hope that everyone else that has left the list will also be encouraged to resubscribe for the benefit of all of us. - Degradation due to increased off-topic posts. Any list will suffer some amount of off-topic posts. Options for dealing with this include do-nothing, hard moderation, or what I call community policing; where list participants ask people to take off-topic discussions somewhere else. Hard moderation requires a significant amount of effort, as has been pointed out. It's simply not feasible to dedicate one or more individuals with reading every single post before approving it for pass-thru to the list. By partitioning this list into more focused communities, we're hoping to find a middle ground by allowing us to task designated DM individuals with community policing of a specific list so that a minimum level of monitoring & oversight is ensured. * What kinds of options were considered? We considered doing nothing, switching this list to a moderated forum, splitting the list, and switching to an NNTP solution. As for splitting the list, we debated quite extensively what the 'right' amount of lists would be. We felt one list was deemed unsustainable moving forward, but neither did we want to create 16 new lists like DOTNET-WINFORMS, -WEBSERVICES, -WEBAPPS, -XML, -DATA, -SECURITY, -REMOTING, etc, etc, etc. So when we decided on splitting the list, we spent a fair amount of time wrangling over the right initial approach. * The list shouldn't be repartitioned because it wasn't originally. Actually, the original charter post to this list (by Don Box) indicated that we would likely split the list as traffic dicated. Refer to [1] for the actual post. * Splitting the list will cause increased traffic due to cross-posts. Also phrased as "how will people know which list to post to"? First, DM list monitors will discourage cross-posting to more than one list. The entire community is encouraged to discourage cross-posting, but we'll strive to make sure that there's always someone at DM responsible for monitoring each list. Second, we believe there are basically two types of subscribers: those that will only subscribe to one list representing their area of interest (say, WinForms apps); and those that want to subscribe to each of the 3 lists and that will think about which list to post to before doing so. For the subscriber that only subscribes to -WINFORMS or -WEB, they'll just post their question to that forum. It doesn't matter if they have a remoting, security, serialization, or data access question. In many cases, their problem is influenced in part by the environment they're developing for, so the answers differ accordingly. In this case, the community benefits from the discussion. For the subscriber that subscribes to all 3 lists (including -CLR), the choice should also be fairly straight forward. If you have an obvious web page or web service question, post to -WEB. If you have an obvious WinForms question - post to -WINFORMS. If you have a question that you recognize is generic and applies to all areas of development (CAS, data access, etc), or where it's not so obvious about where the post should go, the -CLR list was specifically chartered for such conversations. (Please continue reading the next note about redundant discussion before replying to this item :-). * Splitting the list will cause increased traffic due to redundant discussions. Although this might be true to some extent, we believe this is a moot argument... First of all, it will not be considered redundant for people that only subscribe to one list (which we believe will be a larger fraction of the subscriber base compared to people that will subscribe to all 3 lists). Second, those subscribers that do participate in all 3 lists, and that spot a post that's been asked & answered elsewhere, are free to reply indicating that the question has been covered elsewhere, and to please check the archives. This is no different that what happens today on the unified DOTNET list when someone posts a question that's been discussed at length in the archives. "Check the archives" community policing will always be necessary on an unmoderated list. Telling someone to check the archives for this list or another list is the same amount of work for the individual involved. And because the charter for each of the new lists specifically calls out "check the archives before posting" as part of the posting guidelines [2], DM's list monitors will more actively enforce this policy. Finally, we'll be putting a unified multi-archive search engine in place in the very near future to make it as easy as possible to locate the answers to questions that have been previously discussed - no matter which list the discussion took place in (including the archives for this list, which will remain forever). We hope that everyone will recognize that a fair amount of discussion took place on this issue, that the decision was not made in a vaccuum, and that it was not an easy decision to make by any means. However, given all of pros & cons of each approach, we felt this decision was the best one in order to sustain the continued participation of our current subscriber base, recapture the participation of our lost subscribers, and help manage the future growth of each list -- all of which should increase the value to our collective community. -Mike http://staff.develop.com/woodring http://www.develop.com/devresources [1] http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0007&L=dotnet&F=&S=&P=129 [2] For example, see http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0205e&L=dotnetweb&F=&S=&P=5 2 You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
