Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 14:00:04 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: How to do it right Message-ID: <19990906140001.G23466@welearn.com.au>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
If you see someone asking for FreeBSD support here and you want to
answer, please go right ahead, but you know that it has to go to
freebsd-questions instead. When you change the headers to send to the
correct list, please remove freebsd-newbies (but still cc: to the
person who was asking, of course). Cross-posting is generally not
allowed on FreeBSD lists, and freebsd-newbies is for learning things
like "don't cross-post", hence the reminder.
For people who have recently arrived from the Linux world, it might be
confusing at first. While the linux-newbies list is open slather for
easy questions and answers, the freebsd-newbies list is not for support
questions at all. This difference might seem strange, but it is
important, so I'll throw in my viewpoint.
Traditionally Linux users were more concerned with helping friends on
crash boxes at home, while FreeBSD users were more concerned with
making production servers run reliably. To a large extent that is still
the case. A trainee working at Yahoo! or cdrom.com would be a FreeBSD
newbie, for example, but couldn't afford to risk learning from other
newbies' guesses. Someone learning Linux at home or school might learn
a lot by screwing the system a few times, but we don't condone that
sort of thing here because so many of our newbies are people with
serious work to do. They just happen to be new to FreeBSD.
All freebsd help questions and answers, even the smallest, go to
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org. (That information is in the Handbook,
was sent to you personally when you subscribed, is reposted here
weekly, and is currently being reformatted as a series of video clips
with exotic dancers). If people keep answering general support
questions here we might as well combine the two lists, ie kill
free-newbies, because there won't be any difference. It is FreeBSD.org
mailing list policy to avoid overlap between lists.
Freebsd-questions will give you the best and most reliable support you
could ask for. Within the FreeBSD community, quality of help is
important. We don't want to risk anyone being given only the wrong
information, so the best people watch over freebsd-questions and no
potentially inferior list is allowed to duplicate that effort.
But if you'd still rather have your questions answered by other newbies
(and take the consequences), you can have that too. That service is not
provided from within the FreeBSD Project but there is an external list
where newbies can tell each other what they think they know, and help
each other learn more. If that suits you, go take a look. Send a blank
message to freebsd-tips-subscribe@egroups.com to subscribe to that
list, where "no tip is too small". It's a totally separate list, not
part of FreeBSD.org, but started by some newbies who were able to use
this list to plan another activity.
Again, one of the major roles of the freebsd-newbies list is to give
you a casual chatty newbies-only kinda place to learn how to use the
other FreeBSD lists and resources properly while getting to know each
other. If after a year's trial that learning still isn't happening,
we've failed. If newbies' participation here _causes_ people to flaunt
the overall list rules (see handbook), then the newbies list certainly
cannot be justified. Of course, occasional errors are inevitable, and
errors are explicitly allowed on this list, as long as learning
follows. Since most of the ones repeatedly making mistakes are those
who do know better, there is no good reason why this should be getting
out of hand now.
You can ask where to find documentation, which list to post to, how to
(un)subscribe, what is the best way to start learning something, or
engage in any kind of general social chat, but please don't ask
installation or support questions here. You know where to go.
And even more importantly, don't answer them here.
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990906140001.G23466>