Re: a rose by any other name

On Sun, 11 May 2003, Sven Luther wrote:

>On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 11:03:39AM -0700, Craig Groeschel wrote:
>> All the off-topic messages are a minor annoyance to me and not
>> a huge deal, but here are some options I can think of to deal
>> with them, or not.
>> 
>> * status quo, do nothing
>> * intensify the name of the list, change it to "advocacy" or
>> something similar (If this were a newsgroup, what would its
>> name be?)
>> * swap purposes with [email protected], nobody ever uses that
>> one anyway
>> * close it down because there are off-topic msgs
>> * close it down since the initial burst of activity is over
>> 
>
>Ok, ...
>
>As you may have noticed, i did a little inquiry regarding the people who
>did write to the list with support questions. Not all of them responded
>(only 3 or 4), and it seems they all got to the list trough google, or
>so and choose what seemed the more adequate for them.
>
>Ideas to make it better are :
>
>  o Make the [email protected] mailing list more visible in :
>
>    http://www.xfree86.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>    Possibly by moving this list to be the first one, or having a first
>    paragraph in the page that say, use list [email protected] for
>    support questions or such.
>
>  o Add a 'Get Help' link in the top level content. (Already
>    implemented) so that people don't wander around searching for help.
>
>    Notice that :
>
>    http://www.xfree86.org/ and http://www.xfree86.org/help.html
>
>    Are now top two hit for a google search for "xfree86 help", which
>    may improve things.
>
>  o Other feeling i had with discussing this problem with the few people
>    who responded, especially from the french guys, is that they had the
>    impression that the list was xfree86 (xfree86.org) and thus wrote to
>    the forum at xfree86, or something such.

I think most people simply go by their own assumption of what a
list is by the list's name itself.  "forum" sounds like a 'help
forum' to many people likely, so that is quickly becoming the
first place they go to look for help.  The only way to rectify
people's wrong usage of what a list is for based on their wrong
assumption of the name, is to change the name of a list to
something more clear.  The result would be that less people make
the wrong assumption, and less off topic noise comes to the list.

Some alternative list name suggestions completely off the cuff, 
which are much less likely to be misused by people simply looking 
at the list name itself are:

	[email protected]
	[email protected]
	[email protected]
	[email protected]
	[email protected]
	[email protected]
	[email protected]
	[email protected]

Feel free to steal any of those suggestions.  ;o)


>Also, maybe there are other search strings that are commonly used for
>support question and xfree86, and we should look for them.
>
>Anyway, i will continue responding to the misguided support seeking
>users, so it is not needfull for other to do the same, and also notice
>that at least one of these misguided users recomended me that i ask you
>all to be a little less rude to these misguided posts.
>
>Hope this helps some.

Currently, it seems that 2 things are happening simultaneously:
 
1) Legitimate [email protected] traffic is slowing down (for 
   whatever reasons, some of which may be #2)

2) The number of off-topic postings are increasing from people 
   looking for configuration help and tech support, who have 
   arrived here not knowing what the list is actually intended 
   for, despite how they may have wrongly decided this is the
   place to ask.

While this trend may or may not be reversible, it makes the list
less useful, and as #1 continues to go down, and #2 continues to
go up, the S/N ratio makes the list less and less useful overall.  
If the list doesn't get renamed to something more clear, or
rather to something that end users are less likely to make a bad
assumption about, it might make sense to just kill the list and 
redirect traffic to [email protected], and create a new list 
with a better name.

Just a thought.

-- 
Mike A. Harris