On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 11:52:01AM -0400, Ben Scott wrote: [...] > I'm not just arguing to be argumentative (that's room 12A); these > are questions that would need to be answered for anything like a list > charter to be drawn up. > > >... (and then ignore them later with the proper subject line). > > Your parenthetical remark is one of my main points. We still have > the off-topic, endless debate, and discipline issues. Moving the > traffic around doesn't make those issues go away. [...] > >You could join "discuss" and get both. > > What happens when someone posts to -social, but I (subscribed to > -discuss) reply to -discuss? > > >We could try it, and if it does not work what have we really lost? > > Depends on the transition grief. > > For example, who do we subscribe to which list? Or do we start both > lists empty?
I have been through this a few times in the past, with different groups, where the decision was eventually made to fragment the list into multiple lists with more focused charters. I have, to date, never seen it work well. With one exception, all of the mailing lists I have seen fragmented this way have either reverted back to a single main list (sometimes with a separate, often moderated list for announcments, like we have), or gone away entirely. That one exception had strongly focused charters, very clear lines on what topics were appropriate on which lists, and a large team of volunteer list-cops (over 50 when I was in charge of managing them) to keep things on track and ban chronic offenders. They did not have the proposed bad idea of subscribing each of the sub-lists to another list to form a combined list. Even there, the off-topic posts remained, and there was the additional problem of posts being sent to the wrong list, or crossposted to multiple lists. They stuck with it, at the cost of enormous volunteer churn, and lost a large chunk of their membership, myself included, when the "transition grief" was still increasing more than a year after the actual transition was made. I *STRONGLY* believe that this sort of change would be bad for GNHLUG in the long run. Consider how successful the various mailing lists for the local chapters have been. Consider how troublesome trying to keep the job postings on the gnhlug-jobs list has been. Consider how successful the "linux cafe" list, created in response to exactly this complaint back in 2005, was. Does anyone really think this particular division will be more succesful than either of those? If GNHLUG does choose to fragment the list into -social and -tech, please DO NOT try to create a combined 'discuss' list that is subscribed to both, the problems with people replying to the wrong places would be enormous. People who want both can subscribe to both easily enough. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenPGP KeyID 0x57C3430B Holder of Past Knowledge CS, O- Remind me again what it is called when one keeps trying the same thing expecting different results? _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/