On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 10:27:47PM -0500, Bernie Cosell wrote: > Oh, please. If it took a minute to download *all* "143" messages I'd be > surprised. Yes, I know that some folk do pay by the byte but minimizing- > bytes has hardly been a hallmark of the postings to the list... > [thinking here of the HUGE ascii-art hackery, and all of the postings on > the first golf tournament probably didn't add up to as much traffic as > that picture of Larry or Randal or whoever it was, or that 'banner > program']
You seem to have a very poor grasp of the numbers involved. Byte count by thread: ASCII Randal 36964 bytes Banner JAPH 82522 bytes Middle Line golf 214736 bytes Santa Claus golf 548360 bytes Human Sort golf 72582 bytes Get Even golf 382016 bytes TPR0 golf 265586 bytes TPR1 golf 333081 bytes > > > fun for *some* of us, so keep it on fwp, just be careful with subject > > > > "some" being the keyword. I'd say that because it's fun for only *some* > > of us, a separate list is in order. > > Oh please, again. There is *NO* topic that is 'fun' for everyone. No other topic swamps all other traffic on this mailing list. It is quite reasonable that if a specific sub-topic appeals to only some of the subscribers but accounts for most of the traffic on a list, that sub-topic should be spun off into its own list. > I suspect that some folk didn't find the discussion of Perl 6's breaking > printf strings very much fun, so maybe we need a separate list for 'perl > syntax discussions'. Perhaps you missed it, but the printf thread *was* declared off-topic by the list-mom. It would have been appropriate, as you suggest, on a Perl6 syntax mailing list, which already exists. > And then there's the ASCII-art stuff, and the > JAPH's (is it obligatory, by your reckoning, that everyone finds JAPHs > fun?); and then there's the detailed discussions of the side effects of > little-known variables, and... Probably with a little work we could > divide fwp up into 20 separate "focused fun" sublists... some fun. Dividing fwp up into 20 separate "focused fun" sublists would be foolish, because 19 of those subtopics each account, individually, for a small part of FWP's traffic. > I say keep it as one list and have folk learn to use the machinery their > mail clients provide them with; that's why mail clients HAVE that > machinery. I say create a new Perl Golf list, especially for the involved discussion of golf tournaments. (Much like comp.lang.perl.modules was spun off of comp.lang.perl.misc, especially for the discussion of modules.) While I agree that it is *possible* for people to deal with excessive traffic by creating filters, killing threads, and so on, I just don't see why that solution is *better* than creating a new list. Ronald
