Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 04:07:52 +0900 From: chas <panda@skinnyhippo.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: adopt a newbie program - Thanks Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19990828040752.00957750@mail.skinnyhippo.com> In-Reply-To: <199908271828.NAA24127@beowulf.utmb.edu> References: <199908271813.DAA01709@bow.portal.net.au> <199908271813.DAA01709@bow.portal.net.au>
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> > > > Maybe my idea for an adopt a newbie program is lame. > >Ideas honestly posed for consideration are never lame. >Impractical? Yes, I believe so. You are fighting human nature. > > > That's ok. But > > perhaps there needs to be somthing in place to make searching for the > > answers a little more intuitive for someone who is new to the game. > > > >You will get no argument from me on that one. Good materials >always make eductation more efficient. I'm going to go off on a tangent here a little bit : I wish I could stay on the FreeBSD mailing lists... I used to learn a lot here. BUT, there is simply too much traffic for me to cope and sift through it all. So I have to jump on now and again to see how FBSD is doing and/or if I have any problems. Now, has anyone here been on the Sun-managers or Alpha-managers mailing lists ? These are mailing lists for sysadmins of Sun boxes and Digital Unix Alpha boxes. Most of these guys/girls run mission critical apps and high-quality support is paramount. The charter on the lists runs like this : Person-in-trouble posts a question to the list. People who know the answer email him/her directly (NOT broadcast to the list). Person-in-trouble sorts out his/her problem then posts the solution back to the list with a subject line that starts "SUMMARY: " followed by his/her original question. Advantages of such a system : a) people have to show they learned something; it deters the simple questions asked out of laziness. b) sifting through the archives is much easier - you can see the solutions because they have the subject line "SUMMARY:..." in fact, as soon as i got on the lists, that's all i did for the first few days - big learning experience c) less noise of course. this in turn means that members are more likely to read problems etc. d) i don't know why, but people tend to read the FAQs and search the archives more than here. perhaps I'm mentioning this in the wrong context... I know that freebsd-questions sometimes has long threads where people are correcting each other.. and such a forum is valuable. however, there *is* a lot of deja vu in posts. Anyway, such a sytem would allow more people (who probably can not deal with so much traffic), to stay on the list where they can continue to contribute and learn - since these are usually the more experienced members who've gone past the learning stage. I've actually mentioned this before on this very list but it was given a huge thumbs-down. Maybe a separate list would work well - personally I believe it would add credence to FreeBSD support for mission critical apps. On alpha-managers and sun-managers, problems are characteristically resolved in a matter of minutes. (which happens here too but there it's known that systems/jobs and money are at stake). yeah, that was a bit off-topic perhaps. sorry. ctrl-d at will. chas To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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