Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 20:00:00 -0700 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Livia Admin <kreaper@livia.netfoo.org>, David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com>, ML Duke <mlduke@concentric.net>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: questions [was: anyone tried this?] Message-ID: <20001017200000.C1250@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20001017205938.O2537@welearn.com.au>; from sue@welearn.com.au on Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 08:59:40PM %2B1000 References: <20001013112858.A3299@livia.netfoo.org> <Pine.BSF.4.10.10010130956040.347-100000@mlduke.concentric.net> <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>
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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
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