Got an email from Ryan McDougall about my previous d-d-l spam
problem post. He points out what he wrote at a page on
live.gnome.org, which definitely have good ideas and which would
definitely help. While we have tried similar stuff before (I’m really
glad Mark worked so hard at this last year and was disappointed that
others such as Alan flamed him for it); renewing the push to do this
would definitely be good. I think we should do it. But it really
isn’t everything I want either. There are many emails that would be
considered on-topic on d-d-l but which would just be considered spam
to many who would otherwise want to be subscribed to d-d-l. Some
examples:
- freeze break requests are rarely relevant to more than a couple
people outside a given module; those who want to follow those could
subscribe to d-d-l or read the r-t archives instead of the “filtered
d-d-l” list I had in mind - threads about work on a single module don’t appear to be
considered offtopic in many cases (and it’s often hard to tell the
fine-line between offtopic and ontopic for those). Since there are
many who would not want to have to see any of them that aren’t
directly related to the module they are working on, I don’t think
these should appear (other than maybe in summary form) on the
“filtered d-d-l” list I was thinking of. (threads that affect more
than one module, assuming that there was no other relevant mailing
list or place to discuss, should be allowed on the “filtered d-d-l”
list) - consensus threads are ontopic for d-d-l, but are huge and many
people working on just one module and merely want to know the basics
of what is going on don’t care about these (these exact threads have
been the final reason to cause me to unsubscribe from d-d-l more than
once in the past because I just couldn’t keep up and hated manually
filtering–yes, I resubscribed later for various reasons). One or
more summary emails would be much better for many people - Some threads are more than just on topic on d-d-l, they’re sorely
needed (think of the ARC discussion and providing better stability for
3rd party developers; this was one of the coolest recent threads on
the list). But these can still be extremely long. Again, many
who are only working on a single module and merely want to keep a
basic idea of what is going on would be much better served with a
quick summary (or summaries since it may be nice to point out the
thread early on with occasional updates considering its importance)
and a link to the thread on d-d-l. - When people post things who don’t know the rules, everyone ends
up getting at least two posts that aren’t useful to them: (1) the
original email, (2) the email directing that person where they should
ask the question. That’s fine on d-d-l. I would like a list where
you don’t have to see that, because d-d-l is just too high a volume
for many, many people to follow. Again, a “filtered d-d-l” list seems
that it would do the job nicely
Now, of course, there are likely technical issues or other problems
with the ideas I had in mind. I’m not a gnome-sysadmin. I have no
important role with mailing lists (well, other than moderator for
gnome-bugsquad and bugmaster). I don’t even understand much of how
they work. I’m not interested in doing the work necessary to
implement my ideas (I would be, but it sounds like a lot of
effort…). If I had the experience and thought the ideas were sound
and I was willing to put effort where my mouth was, I would have
posted on d-d-l instead of in my blog. You need not worry about my
ideas on this topic. 😉