Brian / SuSE List Manager, This does not directly respond to your question. The below is more aimed at the long threads which I also am subscribed to the Tru64 Managers list. It is like this list in that OS Admin questions are asked. Nobody is officially responsible for answering, but HP personnel do monitor the list and provide help/answers from time to time. What is radically different, is the message flow. 1) Msg sent to list asking a question 2) response msg to the sender ONLY (the list mailer daemon rejects all replies) 3) Direct back and forth msgs between the 2 admins. 4) A summary msg to the list. Must have the word "SUMMARY" in it. The summary message is supposed to identify the fix, and acknowledge anyone that helped. Some people never send in the summary msg, but a surprisingly high number do. Take a look at their archives if you are intrigued by the idea. http://www.ornl.gov/its/archives/mailing-lists I find it works very well, and it is much easier to keep up with than this list. I would guess that the resolved issues per day is far higher on that list than this one, but the number of msgs is far less. Greg Freemyer
I wonder if SuSE would consider assigning/hiring an employee to respond to unanswered requests to this list on a weekly basis. I suggest an employee, because I assume that if anyone on the list KNEW the answer, they would have already provided it. I'd guess, but don't know, that if this employee just devoted Mondays to cleaning up the prior week's dead threads that might be all the time it required (assuming a fairly knowledgable SuSE employee.) Or, it could be someone's full-time job and they could simply stay 1-week behind the list. If something was posted last Monday and hasn't gotten a response by this Monday, then the SuSE-Support-Guru tackles it. (And so on for Tuesday...)
OR, in the open source collaborative spirit, perhaps a team of more experienced SuSE list-readers could volunteer to tackle this project. If one person took last Monday's dead threads, and one person took Tuesday's dead threads, etc., we'd only need 7 or so experienced SuSE users to make a go of this. In the case where you've stumped the expert, they should simply respond to the list that this is the case, and this might catch the eye of one of our other resident experts, and push things towards a solution.
I'm defining a "dead thread" as a question that receives absolutely no responses. This doesn't handle those threads which receive numerous responses that don't resolve the problem. (I myself have started more of those than I care to think about right now.) But until list-users more actively posted [SOLVED] at the end of a successful thread, it would likely be too difficult for one person (especially a volunteer) to pour over every thread and then guess whether it was solved.
That then leads to another recommendation I welcome comment on. While, an e-mail that just says "Thanks" adds to the already high volume of the list, if people more actively replied with Re: [SLE] My Topic [SOLVED] and then described which solution worked for them, it would become possible for us to more easily track which questions never got adequately addressed, and would make archive searching more valuable for those who come after us.
P.S. If you think "dead threads" are a non-issue, I can count over 60 requests to this list, in just the last week, that received ZERO responses. (Some are not yet a week old and may yet be answered, but I think even a 3-4 day old request with no answer would likely alienate a newbie to the list. My 1-week plans above wouldn't address this exactly, but newbies could observe that dead-threads are tackled at the 1-week mark and would then be less likely to lose hope.) Anyway, I think it's in SuSE's best interest to hire people for this purpose as it could contribute significantly to the general opinion users have of the quality of the distribution. Or, if we users want to give back to SuSE and its users, then we need only find 7 SuSE gurus who are willing to devote one day a week to answering on average 9 or so questions that slip through the cracks. (I'd also be open to an area-of-expertise guru system, but then assigning the dead threads becomes a little more complicated, but workable.)
Comments welcome.
-- Brian Support EFF! http://www.eff.org/ They're defending YOUR rights online.
-- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com
Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com