From owner-freebsd-newbies Wed Oct 18 8: 3:53 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from sydney.worldwide.lemis.com (termroom.bsdcon.org [206.55.247.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BD0E937B4D7 for ; Wed, 18 Oct 2000 08:03:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from grog@localhost) by sydney.worldwide.lemis.com (8.11.0/8.9.3) id e9I300b01387; Tue, 17 Oct 2000 20:00:00 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 20:00:00 -0700 From: Greg Lehey To: Livia Admin , David Johnson , ML Duke , freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: questions [was: anyone tried this?] Message-ID: <20001017200000.C1250@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> References: <20001013112858.A3299@livia.netfoo.org> <20001013112858.A3299@livia.netfoo.org> <39E6EEF0.CAB9D949@acuson.com> <20001013112858.A3299@livia.netfoo.org> <20001014155036.A275@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> <20001017205938.O2537@welearn.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <20001017205938.O2537@welearn.com.au>; from sue@welearn.com.au on Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 08:59:40PM +1000 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tuesday, 17 October 2000 at 20:59:40 +1000, Sue Blake wrote: > On Sat, Oct 14, 2000 at 03:50:36PM +1100, Greg Lehey wrote: >> >> As David mentions, we have a problem with -newbies. This question >> belonged on -questions, but it's not always clear that that's the >> right place. When newbies was created, Sue promised that people >> wouldn't ask technical questions on -newbies, and I promised not to >> answer them if they were asked. But if I hadn't, you might not have >> had the right answer. > > The simple solution is if you see a question wrongly posted to > freebsd-newbies, rub out the -newbies and replace it with -questions > before replying, maintaining the cc to the original poster of course. > People used to do that and it worked well. Your three points and my > extra fourth point below take effect then. There are a couple of problems with this: 1. It's the same situation as the original problem: you need to get people to do it. As you observe, most people don't. 2. The other people on -newbies don't see it, so it doesn't set an example. > Remember there's hardly anything a newbie wants more than to be able > to help another newbie. Few realise that they can help out in > -questions too if they do know the answer, and it can be as easy as > changing the header to read -questions instead of -newbies before > sending the reply. I have a feeling that many newbies would feel confident to answer on -newbies, but not on -questions. This does rather sound like the blind leading the blind. >> Somebody else suggested we should change the name of newbies, to >> something like "newbies-chat". That's a bit of a mouthful, but it >> describes things better. > > That was suggested before the list was created, and I preferred that > name, but it was considered that having two hyphens in the name > (freebsd-newbies-chat) would upset the pattern, so naming consistency > triumphed over communication and we took a very big risk. It doesn't > help for me to say "told ya so" now, so I won't :-) Hmm. I checked out our correspondence on this, and found that, at the time, I said to you: > I think that I could summarize the arguments against with "the blind > leading the blind". At least in -questions you have a couple of > one-eyed men. You also have a number of people who can scare > newbies off, sure, but that will happen even if there's a newbies > list. I see we discussed describing the mailing list as "newbie chat", but there was never any discussion of calling it by that name. I still think it would be a good idea. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message