On Sun, 2003-02-09 at 10:39, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> It would be easier to develop an (informed) opinion on this if we (or at
> least I) knew a bit more about what causes you to bring it up as a concern.
> There is a big difference between "some" users and "many" users, since
> "some" people will be dissatisfied with any approach.
Ray,
One of our project members sent me a message off-list expressing a
concern over leaf-user list volume. I have no idea how many of our users
are affected by the volume on leaf-user. Any enlightenment on this is
appreciated.
> We currently have 2 avenues for getting personalized support
> ("personalized" excludes reading FAQs and other docs, though we should
> remember that those options exist too):
>
> leaf-user
> Sourceforge Support requests
>
> One way to cut down list traffic would be to separate the two more cleanly,
> so that Sourceforge Support messages did not also appear on leaf-user.
> Personally, I'd favor that, if only because the format of these messages
> makes them hard to respond to, even to read, on leaf-user.
I can make this change easily. We made the original change because SF
SRs were not being taken care of in a timely manner.
> Another would be to create a couple of low-volume lists: leaf-announce and
> leaf-security. (Or do we already have these, just in moribund form?) Their
> names tell you what I have in mind as their roles ... and their volume
> should be on the order of a dozen message per month, typically. This way,
> ongoing users could keep up with the bare necessities, while new users
> could subscibe to leaf-user while they get up to speed, then unsubscribe
> without being completely cut off.
We already have two lists that are rarely used (leaf-announce,
leaf-hardware).
> All of that is a Baid-Aid, though. The real question that needs to be asked
> is how the people who *answer* requests for help want to do it. That's
> mainly the branch lead developers; a few branch-agnostic developers like
> Lynn and Tom; and a couple of kibbitzers like me. (There are others too,
> but this is the group that answers questions on a day-in-day-out basis.)
> Each of us has to answer that question for him- or herself.
Agreed. That is why I posted the question to our devel list.
> Personally, my interest here is in helping people who want to develop their
> own skills and knowledge, people who will some day cross to the other side
> of the line and become the next generation of developers, troubleshooters,
> and the like. People like many of you here on leaf-devel. In contrast,
> people who want only to consume Open Source software do not interest me as
> much, and they can turn to paid sources of support, buy closed source
> products like Linksys routers, or endure the inconvenience of having to
> read (or delete) "too many" messages. This interest leads me to favor a
> general list like leaf-user, which has the virtue of exposing its
> subscribers to a wide range of LEAF and routing problems, not just offering
> a source of free, personal tech support.
I agree. The only new list that makes sense to me is a new user list.
> Branch-specific lists are an interesting possibility, but here too the
> issue of who would *answer* the queries comes to the fore. (How many people
> answer Sourgeforge Support requests now, for that matter? I only notice you
> and Lynn, though, as I said, I don't read those messages regularly.) I
> suspect Bering would transition nicely to this sort of system, and probably
> Dachstein ... but I see very little traffic on leaf-user about the other
> branches, and I mostly wonder who would be on those lists to answer
> questions. Still, trying it would at least be (mostly) harmless, as long as
> we kept the general leaf-user list in place as well, as a backup
> (identifying it as such in an updated SR FAQ).
Agreed.
> In closing, I do note that this "problem" is pervasive to support mailing
> lists. I'm on maybe a dozen others, outside LEAF, and they all from time to
> time get queries that ask for private or cc'd responses "because I'm not
> subscribed to the list". Before we worry very much about it, we really do
> need to convince ourselves that the existing approach causes us to lose
> users we care about in more than trivial numbers.
I'd like some additional feedback from our project members on the amount
of off-list traffic they're receiving.
--
Mike Noyes <mhnoyes @ users.sourceforge.net>
http://sourceforge.net/users/mhnoyes/
http://leaf-project.org/ http://sitedocs.sf.net/ http://ffl.sf.net/
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