From owner-freebsd-newbies Fri Sep 8 11:20:47 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from heorot.1nova.com (sub24-23.member.dsl-only.net [63.105.24.23]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BAECF37B449 for ; Fri, 8 Sep 2000 11:20:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: by heorot.1nova.com (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 662C03282; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 10:44:22 +0000 (GMT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by heorot.1nova.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4B1923281; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 10:44:22 +0000 (GMT) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 10:44:22 +0000 (GMT) From: Rick Hamell To: David Johnson Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: dos floppies In-Reply-To: <39B92309.C2C65CE7@acuson.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > So now the question arises, what is the possibility of creating a > freebsd-newbies-questions list? Probally Zilch... this list was highly contested at it's creation. It only came into creation on the condition that NO -question -questions were to be asked here. There are several reasons for this; first the FreeBSD team only wants ONE point of contact for questions, it keeps traffic down (from repeated messages,) it allows people answering your questions to track other's answers in same forum. It's only one place to search in the search engine, you get a wider pool of talent to draw your answers from. Many people (myself included,) who wish to help do not really have the time to monitor yet another mail list. And most importantly, Newbies are exactly that, they might accidently give the wrong answer to a question, thereby accidently causing somebody a great deal of pain and suffering. (I've seen that several times here.) By asking the question in a group monitored by "experts" and even many members of the Core Team itself, you're going to be more likely to get the correct answer. Also, many, many, many of the questions I've seen asked here, are NOT -newbie questions by any stretch of the imagination! :) > A) people subscribing to -questions to get answers to complicated > on how to mount DOS floppies. This is a false assumtion. The vast amount of people in -questions like to see these, it means that FreeBSD is getting a bigger following, and that their efforts are being at least appreciated... Again, most people really do want to help. > B) people wanting to know how to mount DOS floppies don't want to know > about the intricacies of L, U and A. This is (IMHO) another incorrect assumption. I've found that reading other messages has helped me in the future fix other problems. (I.e., I had no idea there were two ways to do Firewalls, until I saw someone mention the other, easier to configure way!) It's also helped me answer other people's questions. > C) the message volume in -questions is extremely high. Again, IMHO... 100-200 questions a day is not extremely high...I get between 600-1000 messages a day... Granted I scan subject line for a good portion of them, but I've learned a lot from it.... (I use to get 2000 or more messages a day but found that to be too many for me... :) In my opinion this group -newbies has outlived it's orginal intentions. In fact I believe it never lived UP to it's orginal Intentions. But I believe it's orginal purpose certainly a valid one, and have lately been trying to enforce it's orginal purpose. Othewise this group will be removed by the moderators. Rick To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message