On 12/23/20 7:07 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Simon Lees wrote:
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.
Hi Simon,
yeah it is of course a matter of opinion (or wording), so in my opinion, "being less fit for certain purposes" -
a) goes for many of our lists b) only speaks for merging 'support' back into 'users'.
A quick glance at the archives will show the 'support' list often being as offtopic as the 'users' list was criticised of being.
Thanks for the heads up, I guess we should do a better job of staying on top of that. The constant offtopic is also something that has been off putting to new comers.
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.
That is just life on a mailing list. When/if a thread diverges into offtopic/uninteresting tangents, you just mark those branches as read or flag them as 'ignore'.
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.
How many exactly? Only just today, I see people seeking Tumbleweed support on factory.lists, so something is clearly missing.
Enough that the board saw it as an issue worth addressing. I saw some bug reports and questions around development but no one asking for support.
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.
Much as the current solution has also not been overly successful, in fact only causing more harm -
- the community has been split
Well the community was asked to go to one place.
- it is confusing for newcomers.
Since the list changes yes, we should fix that
- despite 'support' supposedly providing support for TW, people still turn to Factory.
Yeah that was the point of my other post, we will continue to educate new people and will moderate people who should know better
- the split of users and support is inconsistent with the language-specific setup.
Yes we need to find a solution to this in the new year.
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.
AFAICT, the 'users' and the 'support' list both have:
a) the occasional offtopic thread b) lack of TW support.
(a) was always easily solved and never warranted splitting the lists, especially not in the light of that also meaning a split of the community.
The board (before I joined) tried to solve this issue numerous times and in the end gave up and created a new list. As I said previously to solve this issue by merging lists we would need to moderate people who go regularly offtopic and I don't think thats necessarily the best pick for the users list as it will kill off much of the discussions.
(b) seems to me to have remained an issue, as people still go to factory.lists.
Which is not a long term solution either hence my other original email.
Hence, merging the two list back into one would remove confusion without causing any problems.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree then, but this will be something for the next board to sort out, we are just going around in circles now.
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.
If you yourself or the Board had shown the slightest interest, I could have told you that from the beginning. Last I looked, I think the 'support' list had about a tenth the number subscribers of the 'users' list. People vote with their feet.
Given one list is many years older then the other isn't that to be expected? -- 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