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. (Consider, for example, the recent TV commercial that featured a yuppie complaining about the long line to see St. Peter at the Pearly Gates; consider also his fate in that commercial ... "Express Elevator Down".)
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.
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.
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.
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 don't intend here to impose my view on those of us with different priorities ... I'm not even trying to argue for this view here, just to state it clearly ... I merely want to make clear where my personal preferences lie.
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).
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.
At 09:45 AM 2/9/03 -0800, Mike Noyes wrote:
Everyone, It has come to my attention that our leaf-user list volume is discouraging some/many users from using it. We have a variety of options to address this issue.a) Keep things as they are. b) NNTP support (news.gmane.org and/or nntp.sourceforge.net) c) Web support (SF forums for each LEAF release/branch) (note: we already use SF support trackers) d) New LEAF release/branch specific MLs. leaf-bering leaf-dachstein leaf-lince leaf-oxygen leaf-packetfilter leaf-wisp-dist Any suggestions, comments, or opinions are welcome.
-- -------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"-------- Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ leaf-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
