Re: I thought this was a PHP developers list

I've read a bit of this thread and have tried to stay quiet, but since everyone else is voicing their opinions I figured I'd voice mine... - PHP is *FREE*. The people who develop it do it for free. The people who manage these mailing lists do it for free, the newsgroups are free, it's all free. Try and remember that when you bitch. - Splitting up the lists is a bad idea (as some of you have mentioned) since newbies will just post to all of them hoping for some sort of answer. I've seen this discussion pop up in other groups (perl, freebsd, postgresql) and they all end the same way. If they get split newbies just post to them all. There *are* some natural splittings. I think having a separate php-db list is a good idea, but splitting based on experience is silly. What someone considers a beginner question others will consider advanced and vice versa. - It does PHP (and the open source community in general) absolutely NO GOOD when one of us flames a newbie for not checking the manual first. That sort of response will just make them want to go away and never come back again. The end result of that is that PHP won't have a growing user base and will eventually go away and you will be screwed. Okay, maybe it's not that bad, but maybe the person you just scared away is the nephew of the editor of Time magazine who is about to do a report on how cool PHP is and now instead he's going to trash it because his nephews experience (hey, it happens). Do you want that kind of negative publicity? We were all newbies once. Be nice. Even if it is just to say "please look at the manual". Heck, give them the URL even. Help them. What's it take? 10 seconds? I've answered lots of questions with answers like "take a look at the xxx function in the manual at www.php.net". Did I answer their question? Technically no, but I did give them enough of an answer to find it on their own. Maybe next time they will try there first. - As PHP gains in popularity the number of newbies will grow. This also means the number of people who don't read manuals, don't want to figure it out on their own will grow too. It's bound to happen. If we don't help them, who will? No one. And they'll choose CF or ASP and that's not good. - To those of you that complained that the archives are useless and slow please feel free to write a better archive. We'd all benefit from it and I'm sure that the PHP team would love the help. - I wouldn't change the signature on this group since in order to see it you have to be reading the group. The people who post those questions, probably haven't ever seen a message to this group. It would make more sense to implement something like the cgi newsgroup had where every first poster got an auto-reply providing all the necessary info on where to find things. Heck, since this group starts at a single source you could even have it quash that initial message letting them know about the other resources, but if they really want to post it, send it again. That would be very nice. I'd be up for helping figure that one out. Just my 2 cents... -philip