On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 10:11:58 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 02:02:10PM +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
Not only that, but I'm sure that those who use the mailing lists really wouldn't want the 50,000+ people who are subscribed to the forums to start posting all of their questions to the mailing lists. These mailing lists would then become pretty much completely unusable. Mailing lists tend to be suitable for relatively small groups, but if you were suddenly receiving several thousand e-mails a day, I'm sure you would be quite unhappy about it.
Not true at all, I get several thousand emails a day, and they are handled just fine. That's what email clients do, and have done, for years, in a very managable manner.
So don't think this is unreasonable, it isn't.
I think that more or less makes my point, though, Greg - you handle thousands of e-mails a day by skimming subjects and senders and deciding what's important. With all the work you do in the various projects you're involved in, I'm sure you don't actually sit and read thousands of e-mails a day. But that's precisely what those arguing against forums are saying they'd have to do - read every single message, and that that's not a good use of their time. I agree with that, if in fact one sits and reads and replies to every single message they receive. The trick is in applying the same ideas that you undoubtedly use to filter your e-mail to find what's relevant and important to you in a forum setting. Those arguing against using forums seem to be setting up a false equivalency - that in e-mail, they filter, but in forums, they wouldn't, and that's why they can't participate. So maybe I should have more clearly stated it as "if you were suddenly receiving and felt you had to read every single one of thousands of e- mails a day hitting your mailbox", because that's the equivalency that appears to be being set. There's a difference between "handling" and "reading" them, I guess that's what I'm getting at. One can ignore a couple thousand irrelevant messages in a forum just as efficiently as one can do so in e-mail. :) Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org