As far as stats, we've had about 100 people join in the last week. I don't
know how many folks unsubscribed, that seems to be a little harder to track
easily and I don't have time to read through all the logs (if someone would
like to write some scripts to go through the logs and build up these kinds of
stats let me know and I'll get you access). Also hard to know how many of the
folks who joined are spammers, but I don't think that many :-)
This is a tough position for me to comment on because we want the community to
thrive and have a life of its own that isn't controlled by Adobe. That said,
we clearly want to see it succeed and will involve ourselves as necessary to
try to make that happen.
Based on the comments I'm seeing in this thread I don't see the big clamor to
divide the list. I see folks who have figured out workflows that work for
them, and suggestions for how to make things more manageable. That said, the
issue that Anatole raises is whether we are preventing new users from getting
help, or preventing advanced users from participating. Most of those folks who
have been "hurt" we can assume are folks who are not on the list anymore, so
it's difficult to really know without some sort of data as to why they left the
list. If people are willing to wait a few weeks, maybe we could work on trying
to gather that data and make a decision after. Another piece of data we could
use is an analysis of the kinds of posts that have happened recently, perhaps
compared to posts from a year ago, and see if the skill level of posters is
increasing, how many threads are going un answered, semi-subjective view of
signal vs. noise. This would help us understand if there is meaning behind the
low rate of increase in total number of members, as well as the generally flat
nature of posts per month.
Does doing this kind of analysis interest anyone? Are the folks who advocate
separating the list interested in waiting for this kind of analysis? For me,
it seems kind of critical to have real data before making this kind of
decision, as we're going with hunches as to what's really happening here. I'd
have a hard time getting behind a real split when we don't know if doing so
would actually improve things.
Matt
On 6/17/08 3:15 PM, "Anatole Tartakovsky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Doug,
As far as I know, I am the only one in the NY office who did not unsubscribe
from the group. Looks at the stats ( provided by Tim) or just go to the group
page. Also, the number of users if I remember it correctly has been in 9K for
at least 6 month - meaning you have the same number of people in and OUT -
obviously you need to ask Matt if he has more detailed stats on unsubscribes
count.
Regards,
Anatole
On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Doug McCune <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Actually, this is worth going back to, because your initial email said that the
group was "stagnant" and has plateaued with the number of new users and
questions. Except your reason for bringing it up is that the traffic has gotten
too much for you to read every message. So clearly the level of traffic isn't
stagnant. Unless what you're saying is that about 6 months ago the traffic
reached a critical level where you couldn't deal with the traffic but then it
stopped growing.
So I guess I'm saying I question the claim that this list is "stagnant". Almost
10,000 members and an average of 100 messages a day. Are you saying that these
stats have been the same for the past 6 months? And even if that is true
(although I'd like to see numbers before I accept that) then I don't even
necessarily think that this indicates that there's a problem. There's a simple
fact that a ton of questions have already been accurately answered by this
list. I would hope that the archived knowledge of the list serves to answer
more and more questions that newcomers have, meaning they don't need to post
the questions over and over.
What is the real problem? I haven't heard anyone say that the traffic on this
single list has stopped them from asking any questions (although I'm open to
the possibility that this is true, and just hasn't been voiced). And largely I
think that the number of people answering questions has remained high and the
response times are still good. I have heard that the traffic level has stopped
people from reading the questions that others ask (I certainly skim and
sometimes skip entire days). I'd argue that a combination of self-moderated
subject tagging, as well as more aggressive pointing repeat questions to cached
answered (and then tagging the entire thread as a repeat) will largely solve
this problem.
So do you have numbers that indicate the stagnation you are worried about?
Doug
On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Anatole Tartakovsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Matt,
Let us review the goal - in the original post I explained that single group
causes stagnation. If you agree with the numbers and reasoning behind it, let
us look at the proposition in that light. IMHO, the mentioned measures while
staying within the same single group would probably extend the number of users
by 20-30% byhoping to reduce number of posted messages by the same percentage
- but it is hardly the goal we are trying to achieve here.
Realistically Adobe should be looking for place public pace to exchange ideas
and networking as well as getting trivial help. The product and community are
just too big for one group. Let us split it up and let each subgroup speak
their own language. I would gladly moderate standalone enterprise/j2ee/best
practices track. But looking few times a day @ the whole stream to fish out
what might be related to the topic and having some messages falling through the
cracks might be not the recommended "best practices" solution.
Sincerely,
Anatole
On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Matt Chotin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hey folks, let's calm down a little here, K?
Alright, based on what I've been seeing people say, here's my suggestion.
1) Let's get an FAQ going that can be edited by moderators or members of the
community. This will be about common problems that folks run into. One
suggestion of course from me would be that we use the Cookbook for "how-to"
type questions. But for things that don't seem like they're cookbook
appropriate, we can put them in the FAQ. I like the idea of doing it in
Buzzword, though Buzzword docs won't come up in Google. Long-term I think the
right place might be in whatever we set up in the Adobe Developer Center. But
for now how about we just allocate a page off of the opensource wiki. We can
pick some moderators who can edit the page and I will get them added so they
can take care of it. We can also add the link to the FAQ to the bottom of every
email.
2) Some folks suggested that you either mark in the body or in the subject
something that indicates what you're talking about. Seems reasonable. We could
use some of the topics that were being suggested. [UX], [Enterprise], [Data
Services] [Announce], etc. We don't need to limit this, but by following a
convention of placing the general area of discussion, folks will know if
they're going to be capable of getting involved in the thread. The more people
follow this convention, the more efficient it will become.
3) We can get aggressive on the moderation. Rather than just scanning for spam,
moderators can actually look at the posts by new users and decide if they meet
the general criteria for asking a question. If they don't, the moderator can
reject the post and point the user to the forum FAQ which has posting
guidelines.
4) We can update the flexcoders FAQ (which is actually linked at the bottom of
every single post) to include the updated posting guidelines and remove the
common questions section so that the forum FAQ is only about forum etiquette
and the coding FAQ is about the actual problems.
If this sounds OK then what we need are the two kinds of moderators:
1. moderators for the forum itself who are willing to really look at all posts
that are in moderation and analyze whether they should be passed through. If it
is a poorly formed question, the post should be rejected with a pointer to the
forum FAQ.
2. moderators for the FAQ who can pay attention to common questions and update
the FAQ as appropriate.
If we're all on board, send those moderators to me and we can get things set
up. And folks can start following the tagging convention instantly in the
meantime.
Matt
