On May 4, 2014, at 2:57 PM, Forrest Norvell <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Francesco Mari <[email protected]> > wrote: > The main drawback of IRC, as far as I know, is that it's not archived. > Important conversations or solutions to problems are better reported in a > mailing list or in an issue management system. > > Many of the popular IRC channels are archived at > http://logs.nodejs.org/channels (and a lot of good IRC information for Node > users is available at http://nodeirc.info/, unsurprisingly enough), but I > agree that chat logs aren't the most user-friendly tool for finding solutions > to problems. I quite agree — though I’d also argue that neither are mailing list archives. Both are more timely forms of communication. I suspect that nobody knows if or whether there are problems we’re solving, so this gets into generalities quickly. I like the mailing list. It’s one of the three entry points new users find most easily. (StackOverflow and IRC are the others). Both, however, suffer from a plethora of new users and an inconsistent mix of more experienced ones. So does the list — or at least people who don’t give much context for who they are and how they arrive at their answers. All of computing has this problem, I think. It’s a hard one to solve! That whole Dunning-Kruger effect — those who don’t know often don’t know how much they don’t know, and those that do aren’t sure they have the right answers. I, for one, welcome the moderation — the spam and the specific problems being fought are pretty simple for a human to deal with and I trust the gatekeepers for that as it were. The rest of our culture is up to us. What do we want it to be?
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
