Dividing The List Considered Harmful [Was: Re: Subject Lines on the Mailing list: [WAS: Looking for a NH mail list talking about Linux]]

mike ledoux mwl+gnhlug at alumni.unh.edu
Tue Mar 27 12:45:49 EDT 2007


On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 11:52:01AM -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
[...]
>  I'm not just arguing to be argumentative (that's room 12A); these
> are questions that would need to be answered for anything like a list
> charter to be drawn up.
> 
> >... (and then ignore them later with the proper subject line).
> 
>  Your parenthetical remark is one of my main points.  We still have
> the off-topic, endless debate, and discipline issues.  Moving the
> traffic around doesn't make those issues go away.
[...]
> >You could join "discuss" and get both.
> 
>  What happens when someone posts to -social, but I (subscribed to
> -discuss) reply to -discuss?
> 
> >We could try it, and if it does not work what have we really lost?
> 
>  Depends on the transition grief.
> 
>  For example, who do we subscribe to which list?  Or do we start both
> lists empty?

I have been through this a few times in the past, with different
groups, where the decision was eventually made to fragment the list
into multiple lists with more focused charters.  I have, to date,
never seen it work well.  With one exception, all of the mailing
lists I have seen fragmented this way have either reverted back to
a single main list (sometimes with a separate, often moderated list
for announcments, like we have), or gone away entirely.

That one exception had strongly focused charters, very clear lines
on what topics were appropriate on which lists, and a large team of
volunteer list-cops (over 50 when I was in charge of managing them)
to keep things on track and ban chronic offenders.  They did not
have the proposed bad idea of subscribing each of the sub-lists to
another list to form a combined list.

Even there, the off-topic posts remained, and there was the
additional problem of posts being sent to the wrong list, or
crossposted to multiple lists.  They stuck with it, at the cost
of enormous volunteer churn, and lost a large chunk of their
membership, myself included, when the "transition grief" was still
increasing more than a year after the actual transition was made.

I *STRONGLY* believe that this sort of change would be bad for
GNHLUG in the long run.

Consider how successful the various mailing lists for the local
chapters have been.  Consider how troublesome trying to keep the job
postings on the gnhlug-jobs list has been.  Consider how successful
the "linux cafe" list, created in response to exactly this complaint
back in 2005, was.  Does anyone really think this particular
division will be more succesful than either of those?


If GNHLUG does choose to fragment the list into -social and -tech,
please DO NOT try to create a combined 'discuss' list that is
subscribed to both, the problems with people replying to the wrong
places would be enormous.  People who want both can subscribe to
both easily enough.

-- 
mwl+gnhlug at alumni.unh.edu          OpenPGP KeyID 0x57C3430B
Holder of Past Knowledge           CS, O-
Remind me again what it is called when one keeps trying the same
thing expecting different results?




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