On 12/21/20 6:15 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
For the English language users/support lists, they were only split about two years ago, whereas the single 'users' list worked flawlessly some eighteen years prior to that. Also, by looking at the traffic on 'support', there appears to be more user chat than support.
'flawlessly' is a matter of opinion, the board received many many complaints about the list in that time
Hi Simon,
I certainly agree it is a matter of opinion, my own coming from having been a list member for that long. I think that eighteen years is a long time for a dysfunctional mailing list.
I wouldn't use dysfunctional to describe the list, i'd say less fit for certain purposes then some other alternatives.
My point was rather than the other language-specific lists do not have an issue with combining users and support, so maybe the English language groups ought to revert to that scheme too.
My opinion here is that the volume on the english list maybe makes it special compared to most of the other language lists.
Agree, there is no doubt the volume of traffic is a lot higher, but I don't know how that should make it special. Why do you think so? I think a high-volume list is a good sign, a sign of a community that is alive and kicking.
The higher the volume the more time someone needs to invest into whether this post is A: A question at all B: something I can help with and if so then go through all the emails in the thread to work out if the question has been answered this last part is especially hard if the email goes off on tangents. Previous boards had a number of complaints from people who found the volume and off topic nature of the opensuse@ list meant it was impossible for them to provide support there because mostly they were spending there spare time keeping up with the list and then didn't have time to offer support. Many of the people that raised such issues have gone on to offer significant support on the new support list.
Maybe it would be less confusing if we had a "Support" and "Discussion" list.
If I may suggest - the reason "discussion" will occasionally become more prevalent is simply that "support" is not forthcoming. The English-language 'users.list' is a list with a large number of members, presumably most better qualified for offering discussion than support. That cannot be helped, at least I don't know how.
Yeah a previous board ended up coming to the decision that the least worst way to do this was to create a dedicated support list to help the people only interested in providing support. Boards before I joined tried several times to solve these issues without creating an alternate list which wasn't successful.
I believe having a well functioning support list is vital to the project,
Agree. The issue is, as Felix and others have pointed out, that we appear to have some confusion about which list is good for that.
Yes this is something we should work on solving. I guess a further alternate solution could be moving the support list to be the users list and the users list to be the offtopic list but then still the name is slightly missleading, or having a users-support list and a users-discussion list.
if we were to merge the lists then we would need moderate the solresulting list reasonably heavily to ensure it stays as a functional support platform that keeps all the people willing to provide support happy.
Why is that ? We don't need moderation, we need qualified people who can support others, that is all.
Moderation as in moderators who would keep the list on the topic of support and would place anyone who regularly takes the list away from the topic of support under moderation. This is not something I want to see because it would completely kill off the current vibe of the users list but history shows it would be the only way for that list to function as openSUSE's primary support email list.
Simon, as your stance does not seem to correspond well to the current Board position, I assume you are speaking as a community member ?
I am speaking as I believe the only remaining member of the board from the time when this decision was made. Who at the time strongly pushed for a new list to be created for support, But who also pushed to keep the original opensuse@ list at the same time when serious consideration was being given to close it completely. I recognise it is a valuable place for many people in the community just that it wasn't functioning well as the primary support place. At that time we had opensuse@opensuse.org and opensuse-support@opensuse.org which was probably less confusing to new people then the users and support we have currently. Obviously I have the insights behind why we did what we did then but the current board is yet to discuss this in detail and i'm unsure if we will before the new board comes into affect for next year.
I think there are many people on the users list who would be rather unhappy with that solution however, we fundamentally have 2 different groups of people who want and expect two very different things and i'm not sure how we can resolve that into 1 list
For eighteen years it worked quite well. I do not think that splitting our user community has improved on that.
I'll repeat from my earlier post:
I think the real question to ask - to see if re-merging is warranted - is if the new support list has achieved its declared purpose.
Surely the advocates from back then can answer that question.
From the perspective that previously the board was regularly getting complaints about members of the opensuse@opensuse.org list frequently taking the list off-topic and making it hard for other to provide support and that we haven't had any complaints since (Other then 1-2 CoC violations) to me indicates that what we had when we had opensuse@opensuse.org and opensuse-support@opensuse.org was better then what we had with just one list. In the context of the other list names whether what we have now in terms of naming is good i'm less sure, especially as the new list page shows lists by volume which will probably rank users above support much of the time. With the old setup we could and did emphasize the opensuse-support list over the opensuse list so it was more obvious to new users which they should choose. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B