Mailing list <-> forum gateway

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Austin English <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 1:52 PM, Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI
<[email protected]> wrote: Hmm. That's two people who are upset by the
increase in newbie questions.

I'm starting to think that perhaps we do need
to map the existing forum to a wine-users-newbies list.
I think that amount of segmentation might in fact
be useful.
- Dan

What am I missing here? I have received maybe 10 messages (just a
guess. Maybe more.) in the last couple of days. It doesn't seem (to me
anyway) that this is enough to cause anyone heartburn but clearly
Renaud is upset by this. I receive something in the range of 250-300
messages a day so I hardly see the increase but there have been a few
more.

Am I not receiving all the messages?

Anyway, I wouldn't want app maintainers quiting over something like
this, nor would I prefer to have newbies be without the help of
maintainers also. Instead of changing the users list maybe there needs
to be some sort of maintainers list for folks like Ranaud?

I'm perfectly happy with whatever you do but if there are two lists
let me know how to get signed up for whatever the new one is.

Cheers,
Mark

I don't think we should be turning away those seeking help...That's
the whole point of wine-users/the forum. If you didn't want to help,
you shouldn't have signed up for it. Putting a couple warnings/links
to the FAQ/etc should help the situation.

Austin,
Excuse me but I'm neither the one who signed up to help people nor
the one expression concern over higher list volumes. That was Renaud.

In defense of Renaud's position, I can understand (but don't agree
with) his frustration. Personally I agree with you. I would rather
have a single medium volume list that served the most people possible
rather than segregate things and make it harder for newbies to get
some help.

And Renaud is free to stop being an app maintainer. I stopped some
time ago when it became clear to me that there was little to no
linkage between what I was hoping to do with the apps and what the
developers were willing to work on. (I.e. - they didn't look at
anything and I all I ever got was requests to verify existing problems
over and over on new revisions of Wine.)

Anyway, that's my 2 cents and I'll go into hibernation now.

Cheers,
Mark

[DARKGuy .]

On 3/3/08, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI <[email protected]> wrote:

On Monday 03 March 2008, my mailbox was graced by a missive
from "DARKGuy ." <[email protected]> who wrote:

can use the mailing list instead.

Mailing list now getting clogged up with beginners questions.

For me that's it, I'm leaving, and you'll have to find new maintainers for
the
apps I maintained.

Cheers,

Ron.
--
Individualists, unite!

-- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org --

That's sad to hear, yet, it's your choice.

You're upset by the newbies. What's all this about the, oh, opensource
knowledge sharing thing? if this is how the wiser guys are going to
behave towards the ones seeking help -- in order to be as wise as the
ones who taught them -- then the whole fuss about the opensource world
and people collaborating together is a JOKE.

I'm a channel mod at a game server with about 500-700 people online
24/7 (retired now though, too much work and stuff) and I was a Beekin
Helper in a game called Furcadia (being a helper meant to deal with
noobs everytime, EVERYTIME). Yes, they're sometimes tiring and
annoying, but it's rewarding!! there's nothing better than knowing
that somebody you helped is there for when you need him/her in any
situation (you never know when your life might spin 360 degrees...),
or even thank you in the future for the support and the help you gave
so they could reach the knowledge they have now.

Would you be happy if you weren't taught by your teachers, by your
parents, by your friends (we all learn something new everyday!), if
they only discriminated you because you were a noob at life? I
wouldn't, and I'm glad of the help and teachings I got from them.

Nobody is born already taught.

I second the mailing-list split-up though, if this causes more "wise"
people to leave...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 04 March 2008, Mark Knecht wrote:

I'm perfectly happy with whatever you do but if there are two lists
let me know how to get signed up for whatever the new one is.

The right balance for me was to filter the forum user messages out in my
mail client. The bandwidth consumed is negligible and any interesting
threads that got deleted in error are still there in Trash.

I don't find the split lists work well - three of my local LUGs have
split into -chat -tech and -noise lists, so most people end up
subscribing to all anyway and those that don't tend to cross-post which
defeats the objective.

--
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

[L. Rahyen]

On Monday March 3 2008 21:52:04 Dan Kegel wrote:

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI

<[email protected]> wrote:

Mailing list now getting clogged up with beginners questions.

For me that's it, I'm leaving, and you'll have to find new maintainers
for the apps I maintained.

Hmm. That's two people who are upset by the
increase in newbie questions.

I'm starting to think that perhaps we do need
to map the existing forum to a wine-users-newbies list.

I disagree. I can agree with idea to split up the list only if number of
messages per day will be big (but currently it is small).
If we decide in the future to split up the list, we shouldn't try to
separate "advanced" users and "newbies" (it was already explained recently by
someone why this is pointless). What should be done in such case is to
separate discussions by topic (each topic will have its own list and proper
forum link if the list is intended for typical users or no link at all if it
isn't - wine-devel is good example of such list). But currently we have too
small number of messages per day, so there is no need to split up, really.

* * *

Personally I don't understand these people. It is quite easy to skip messages
or topics if you don't want to read them (or even use filters like Alan)...
In fact this is how I read wine-bugs (it should be noted that I have very
little free time) - if I see a message that might be useful for me I read it
or skip it otherwise.
Number of mail per day in wine-users is quite small, and people who maintain
application(s) should be either interested in *some* newbie's questions who
ask something related to programs they maintain or they should be interested
in general user questions (if they are not why they are subscribed to this
list?). Anyway, skipping newbie questions from the forum will take at worst
1-3 minutes of *additional* time per day (or even almost a zero if you filter
all messages from the forum) - I don't believe this is a problem for someone
who want to *help* users at this list. And as we can see, all people who help
users *actively* either like forum <-> mailing list link or at least agree
that it is useful thing. It is obvious that this is good for WINE Project
because by having a forum and supporting users there we are becoming more
user-friendly. And if we are becoming more user-friendly, we will have more
users and therefore more popularity; in "long run" that means more
developers, bug-reporters, maintainers, etc.
Anyway, I think it is obvious that wine-users list does exist for *users* who
need help (and whose questions aren't suitable for wine-devel) and for people
who want to *help* such users (of course there is some people who just read
the list or major part of its messages without helping anyone - "just for
fun", and either don't post at all or post very rarely).
BTW, by definition, most users of WINE are newbies. For advanced
questions/discussions (and not general user questions) we already have
wine-devel list.

I think that amount of segmentation might in fact
be useful.
- Dan

Current traffic (for wine-users) is small. So personally I don't see any
reason to create another list (especially just because of one or two people
who write messages rarely and even more rarely actually helped users at this
list in the past). Even if at some point in the future number of messages
will be very big in this list, we may want create different lists for
different topics (and link them with the forum accordingly) and leave
wine-users for general questions/discussions.
In other words, it is better separate discussions by topic than to blindly
separate users by "type" ("newbie" or "advanced"). But currently there is no
need to create more lists than we already have (IMO).
BTW, we already have such system: wine-users, wine-patches, wine-bugs,
wine-announce, wine-releases, wine-tests, wine-cvs, wine-tests and
wine-devel lists dedicated to completely different topics. It is easy to see
how this approach can effectively sort all messages by topic (and give the
ability to subscribers to choose what they want to receive to inbox).

[Sterling Christensen]

I think the down sides various people have mentioned about separating it a
little are overblown. Suppose they were to add to the forum a beginner's
category which is disconnected from the mailing list:
1. The segregation would be no worse than pre-gateway. There was a relative
lack of maintainers and devs on forums before the gateway and there would
only continue to be. The maintains who have left have shown that the status
quo isn't really better either.
2. Yes, some users may misjudge whether their question belongs inside or
outside the beginner's section, but I doubt there would be so many as to be
a serious problem.

The beginner's section could have sticky topics with links to beginner FAQs.
If somebody asks a question that isn't likely to be answered in the
beginner's section, a moderator can move it to the section that is linked to
the mailing list.

I think that's as close as it can realisticly get to what the gateway was
supposed to accomplish without driving more knowledgable people away.

-Sterling Christensen


On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Austin English <[email protected]>
wrote:

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 1:52 PM, Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI
<[email protected]> wrote:

maintainers for the

Hmm. That's two people who are upset by the
increase in newbie questions.

I'm starting to think that perhaps we do need
to map the existing forum to a wine-users-newbies list.
I think that amount of segmentation might in fact
be useful.
- Dan

What am I missing here? I have received maybe 10 messages (just a
guess. Maybe more.) in the last couple of days. It doesn't seem (to me
anyway) that this is enough to cause anyone heartburn but clearly
Renaud is upset by this. I receive something in the range of 250-300
messages a day so I hardly see the increase but there have been a few
more.

Am I not receiving all the messages?

Anyway, I wouldn't want app maintainers quiting over something like
this, nor would I prefer to have newbies be without the help of
maintainers also. Instead of changing the users list maybe there needs
to be some sort of maintainers list for folks like Ranaud?

I'm perfectly happy with whatever you do but if there are two lists
let me know how to get signed up for whatever the new one is.

Cheers,
Mark

I don't think we should be turning away those seeking help...That's
the whole point of wine-users/the forum. If you didn't want to help,
you shouldn't have signed up for it. Putting a couple warnings/links
to the FAQ/etc should help the situation.

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[AlanJ]

I think that on the forum side there does need to be a sticky setting some basic rules (ie check AppDB first, use meaningful subject name, etc).

Having said that the people who are more likely to ask the questions that really infuriate people are also more likely not to read the rules first. What you do to educate those people I don't know but if you find a solution I'm sure every forum/list maintainer in the world would like a copy of it

It would be a shame to split the list/forum as the problem is with a minority who won't follow rules and guidelines but just blunder in with their "help plz pac-man don't work" post with roughly the same message text (ie no helpful information regarding versions, etc).

[James McKenzie]

Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:

On Monday 03 March 2008, my mailbox was graced by a missive
from "DARKGuy ." <[email protected]> who wrote:

can use the mailing list instead.

Mailing list now getting clogged up with beginners questions.

At one time WE all were beginners. It is up to us to help them get
where they want to go. I'm all for a FAQ, and I've read the one on the
Wiki and it is fine as-is. We need to educate the noobs that such a
thing exists and that the answer to their current question is there.

For me that's it, I'm leaving, and you'll have to find new maintainers for the
apps I maintained.

Please continue to maintain the Apps. You just don't have to read the
list to find that there are problems with them or that users are
experiencing problems by reading the list.

James McKenzie

[Ove Kaaven]

James McKenzie skrev:

Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:

Mailing list now getting clogged up with beginners questions.

At one time WE all were beginners.

Actually, I can't recall that I was ever a "beginner" in this sense. I
remember downloading Wine and toying with it, trying to get stuff to
run, looking through the source code to figure out what was wrong, and
then submitting patches. I can't remember ever asking newbie questions
on the newsgroup (yeah, newsgroup, this was before the mailing lists -
and I think I was involved when they were created). Then again, my
memory could be faulty, I suppose.

But I'm pretty sure Alexandre wasn't much of a nuisance to the Wine
developers when he started out...

Looking through the current state of wine-users, I'd too agree that the
quality of the list has dropped through the floor. Even those forum
users who appear diligent about giving helpful and informative answers
to other forum users, are clueless half the time and occasionally even
propagate misinformation.

The other day, I did almost reply to a forum user with a more
interesting question than most, but decided against it - it being more
interesting didn't really make it less ignorant, and trying to answer
his question *without* also using offensive words wasn't really worth
the possible risk of ulcer.

[David Gerard]

On 06/03/2008, Ove Kaaven <[email protected]> wrote:

Looking through the current state of wine-users, I'd too agree that the
quality of the list has dropped through the floor. Even those forum
users who appear diligent about giving helpful and informative answers
to other forum users, are clueless half the time and occasionally even
propagate misinformation.

I fear the price of popularity is a lessening proportion of
technically able users and an increasing proportion of users who can't
or won't formulate clear questions - Ubuntu is increasingly popular
with non-technical users who are sick of Windows, and if they have a
favourite Windows app they want to bring it with them, and Wine is
better and better.

FAQs alleviate this, but don't cure it - you can lead people to clues
but you can't make them think. So those who can think will read the
FAQ, and the visible questions from who can't or won't will get dumber
and dumber ...


- d.




- d.

[Peter]

A health list has...
... noobs
... more experienced noobs that help the noobs,
... advanced noobs that help themselfs and the less experienced noobs,
... expert noobs that help themselfs, less experienced and the geek noobs
... geek noobs those that start to look for the next level of noob being. (i.e. devlist)



so please no split

For everything else I recommend to take the Time and try to explain things to a noob. Only if you have no trouble in explaining then you realy know it.
Test yourself today and answer a noob question!!

And keep in mind. Only the true geek wants to be noob for eternity.

(One reason I love Linux )

Have Fun and enjoy the choice.