On Jan 6, 2009, at 1:54 AM, Henri Yandell wrote:
I think the path lies in between the two views. We're not out to kill user lists outright imo. A project becomes viable for the Attic when it has no developer community. It may still have user community and part of the point of having the Attic is to be more transparent to that user community that they're on their own. Keeping some level of resource open to them is valuable I think - in themselves a user list provides a community that can support itself and knowing the dev community is dead may kick them into doing something. That may be at SourceForge, it may be in the Incubator, but it's better than the slow heat-death that projects usually go through. However - we're not here to maintain that user community. We're fully expecting the list to quieten down if it's not already quiet. We need use cases to really figure this stuff out.
The only cost to keeping the user list alive is that it will still need moderators. I think it would be much easier if users could be redirected to an "attic users list" that we could moderate. This would be similar to commons where the subject in a post is supposed to reflect the subproject. What would be even better is if when they post to the "dead" project's mailing list if that project name could automatically be tacked on to the subject.
Ralph
