Good morning (/afternoon/evening) all;
This is more or less an RFC-type email, hence the subject line. I
would like to see your comments on this case, and maybe we can forge
some sort of agreement or unofficial treaty or something.
Oftentimes we see a user post a question to the list, with ongoing
discussion back-and-forth on a troublesome issue, and when a solution
is found, the subject line has an added [SOLVED] tag on it. While
this makes sense in a forum style arena, where posts are binded
statically in the same group, it defeats the purpose of mailing list
archives such as Nabble and GMANE. A recent email from this morning
illustrates the problem, as displayed presently at this page:
http://www.nabble.com/PHP---General-f140.html
The email with the subject "The PHP License" received commentary
from both Jochem Maas and myself, and the OP (AmirBehzad Eslami)
replied to the message, appending the [SOLVED] tag to the subject.
This is not a serious issue in this particular matter, as it was a
simple thank-you message out of politeness (which is greatly
appreciated, Amir!). However, using just a single example should help
to emphasize my point exponentially when you consider the frequency of
occurrences we see following the [SOLVED]-appended route.
On 12 September, 2007, Zbigniew Szalbot posted a message to the
list about a segmentation fault in PHP 5.2.3. Over the next 24
hours-plus, exactly sixty comments passed back-and-forth on the
thread. When a solution was found, it was posted in a separate email
with the [SOLVED] tag added to the subject line, and two additional
comments added to that (entirely new) thread.
Why is this such a critical issue? Because if we hope not to have
to answer the same questions over and over again, instructing people
to properly STFW, then we should at least be contributing to proper
archival and documentation of problems we've successfully solved.
Using the aforementioned example, we check Google for the same
problem:
http://www.google.com/search?q=php+5.2.3+segmentation+fault+core+dumped
Hooray! Someone else has had the exact same list of problems, and
now I can simply go through all of the responses and it should
(fingers crossed!) correct my issues as well.
Message 58.... 59.... getting close!.... sixty-one.... WHAT?!? No
solution? Back to Google.... only to find that each result is exactly
the same discussion, never including the final three emails.
So the summary of my proposal is as follows:
1.) An issue has been identified with the list whereby
improper archival will likely lead to repeat questions and unnecessary
traffic to the list.
2.) I propose that we discontinue the act of subject
modification to indicate a change in status of the issue (SOLVED,
ALSO, ANOTHER PROBLEM, etc.) unless a completely different problem is
reached or question is asked. This will allow a step-by-step document
(of sorts) to be created and made "searchable" on the web.
Comments welcomed!
--
Daniel P. Brown
[office] (570-) 587-7080 Ext. 272
[mobile] (570-) 766-8107
If at first you don't succeed, stick to what you know best so that you
can make enough money to pay someone else to do it for you.
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
