RE: [PHP] New lists (was [PHP] Attitude of B van Ouwerkerk)

I think the problem with spreading out discussions that can be as broad as the PHP discussion is that you still tend to have people gravitate towards some of the more "general" or "higher level discussion" groups regardless of whether or not it should fall into the "newbie" category or not. This is for a couple of reasons: 1) Newbies may think that their newbie group is read mainly by newbies...so their question either might not get answered at all or will not receive the thorough answer they were hoping for. 2) Being a newbie, they might think that their question is "worthy" (for lack of a better term) of higher level discussion because, to them, it is a very difficult problem to solve. ...not to mention that questions would then be "spammed" across multiple mailing lists anyway. Either way, we would still need a PHP General Forum, so I am not convinced that creating more specialized mailing lists would accomplish much more than creating MORE mail traffic (from the spammed questions) and alienating people who used the more specialized lists because most everyone else is still mainly reading the "General Forum." My 2 copper pieces worth. Sam Masiello Software Quality Assurance Engineer Synacor (716) 853-1362 x289 smasiello@synacor.com -----Original Message----- From: Darren Henderson [mailto:darren@bmv.state.me.us] Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2001 10:41 AM To: B. van Ouwerkerk Cc: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: [PHP] New lists (was [PHP] Attitude of B van Ouwerkerk) On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, B. van Ouwerkerk wrote: > There's nothing wrong with being a newbie.. the only newbie-problem I > see/have is the lazy one.. ask ask ask ask without taking the time to read > the manual or to do a search in the archive. Sure there are newbies who > read the manual.. get some tutorials.. thats good. They should get all the > support they need.. Unfortunately this kind of thing happens on all the mailing lists I've seen that are devoted to questions. The real problem here is that the list is simply too busy. I can do no more then skim the subject lines and then usually delete all of it unless something jumps out at me. It might be helpful if some new mailing lists were created, it wouldn't be a perfect solution but it would help if there were some degree of self selecting behavior possible. Currenty all questions go to php-general. If there were, say, a php-newuser and a php-questions list then perhaps php-general could be used for slightly higher level discussions. Actually its probably too late to "save" php-general, hard to get people to change. Maybe a new list that caters to a higher level of discussion, say php-authoring or the like? Just a thought. So much tends to get lost or over looked in high volume mailing lists. ________________________________________________________________________ Darren Henderson darren@bmv.state.me.us darren.henderson@state.me.us -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net