Re: keeping traffic on this list manageable

On Friday 31 October 2008 1:23:12 pm Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote: > Here I come to the key part of my idea. We would allow every PHP > usergroup to also appoint one person that gets unmoderated access to > the list. This enables members of the usergroup to feed their ideas > via that person directly to the list, taking load of the list > moderators and ensuring that things a given UG deem important are not > lost in this process. Furthermore this intermediate step would serve > to throttle the traffic and make the numbers of posters (their writing > style and expertise) more easily transparent to other posters (but > more importantly to the readers). I am sure this will help reduce > misunderstandings and more importantly result in a more friendly tone > (its just natural for people to feel overwhelmed by too large a crowd). My concern here is that an UG is not necessarily a good representative "constituency". As an example, I don't think there's anyone else from the Chicago UG on this list right now; certainly no one I recognize. Most of the local PHPers aren't interested in internals as far as I'm aware, for whatever reason. However, my main activity is with the Drupal project. More than half of the posts I make are related to how Drupal could potentially leverage new features down the road. If I were to "represent" any particular group and "ensure that things [it] deem[s] important", it would be Drupal, not Chicago, and I think I'm one of only 2 Drupal core devs on this list. But Drupal isn't an UG, so that wouldn't qualify as a constituency. I'm sure there's some other definition of constituency besides regional UG and project that makes just as much sense, too. From my mostly-outsider POV, most of the "noise" I see on this list is either bikeshedding (which is hardly a PHP-specific problem) or people that seem to know each other well so I assume are core folks talking past each other, whether maliciously or not. I don't see anything that "keep out the riff-raff" would inherently fix. Except for the recent namespace separator thread-of-doom, this list is generally much slower paced than, say, php-general. -- Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com