I think the situation with some off-topic posts can be complicated. Some
newbies don't have the technical knowledge to determine when something is
off topic. JDBC is a good example, since you may be coding JDBC stuff in a
servlet and to a newbie that makes it servlet-related. Also, since this is
a public forum, there's always going to be a cadre of folks who just don't
care about ettiquette and post whatever they want wherever they want to.
I find the noise generated by the process of letting someone know they are
off-topic (possible replies, additional explanations, etc.) almost as
annoying as the original, innapropriate post.
I suggest the best treatment for an off-topic poster is to simply ignore
them. People who get no answer of any kind will sooner or later move on to
another resource with their problems. Meanwhile, the rest of us can get on
with the business at hand.
Just my 2 pennies worth...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pier Fumagalli [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 3:53 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [ADMIN] Please Read: Community driven list?
>
>
> I received a bunch of comments about me being "on the list"
> lately, mostly
> positive saying that a "moderator" was so much needed on
> servlet-interest.
>
> Well, let me tell you one thing, I never heard about this
> list until Danny,
> the spec lead, "offloaded" it on me, and asked me to play the
> moderator...
>
> I started in November lurking, and posting a couple of stuff,
> this last
> week, fairly enough, I had some spare time to dedicate to it,
> and I red a
> couple of messages who made me see that things were not going...
>
> Then Milt Epstein (I believe it was him), posted me an idea,
> why not having
> the policies on line, so that anyone could have pointed them
> out. I took
> what Danny wrote quite some time ago, HTMLized, and posted on my home
> machine.
>
> Now, I'm not here to enforce anything, I don't like to be the "ruler"
> especially of an open forum, where everyone is welcome to
> come and talk, but
> definitely someone needs to take a clear point ad say "this
> is allowed" and
> "this is not".
>
> I spent the last 5 years of my life on open source projects, mostly on
> Apache stuff (first JServ, then Cocoon, now Tomcat) and what
> we have in that
> place is the concept of "community". Anyone can come, post
> code, fixes,
> comments, ideas, and those make up a successful product.
>
> Our product here is "knowledge", it's a mailing list, an open
> forum, but it
> seems that we're far from building a community. There are
> long time friends,
> like Nic Ferrier who follow the list daily and are great
> contributors, but
> we are not a community. In "Borg" terms (can you tell I like
> Star Trek?) we
> are individuals, while in my opinion we should be more like a
> collective.
>
> I'd like all of you to go ahead and read the "rules" I posted
> yesterday, and
> send comments, NOT TO ME, to the list itself, let everyone
> see what you
> think and what you want, let's discuss those rules and
> improve them, so that
> everyone will be happy with them. And when we get to an
> agreement, I'd like
> to see each of you pointing out at our self-imposed rules and
> enforce them,
> don't be shy to tell "hey, keep your long-ass press release
> out of this
> list", or "check the archive because that question was
> answered last week".
>
> Let's try to build a community around this incredible bunch
> of hundreds of
> people, and let's make this community become something
> _really_ useful and
> likable.
>
> Also, post ideas, what you want to see around here. An
> example, Anantha
> Krishnan (the guy I played 20 "Google" questions with two
> days ago) asked me
> if it was possible to come up with a "code repository" of examples and
> tools, we all have bandwidth and on-line megabytes to waste,
> do you think
> it's needed? Would you like to have it? Or would you rather
> see a FAQ system
> on which anyone can contribute? Send over your ideas, and if
> we all agree on
> them, we can find some volunteer between us to make them
> become reality.
>
> Let's work on this thing, on Apache we are delivering code,
> here we are
> producing "knowledge", we have a wonderful technology called
> Java and we all
> want it to be successful, or do you want to go back and code
> CGI in C or
> PERL again?
>
> Let's build _the_ servlet users community...
>
> Pier
>
> BTW, I'll still be the "moderator", but in case you didn't
> understand it, I
> want to "offload" this job on each of you guys.... :) Money
> for nothing :)
>
> --
> Pier Fumagalli - Sun Microsystems, INC -
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'm selling my Sony Vaio Z505. Check out <http://www.betaversion.org/~pier/>
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