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List:       lua-l
Subject:    mailing list noise, filtering (was Re: Getting Started with Lua + mailing list split)
From:       Jay Carlson <nop () nop ! com>
Date:       2013-07-25 14:17:10
Message-ID: 44E7D620-FBB8-4921-95EE-2F3ADE9D944E () nop ! com
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On Jul 19, 2013, at 5:23 PM, petah wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Jul 2013 16:33:59 -0400
> Daurnimator <quae@daurnimator.com> wrote:
> > On 19 July 2013 16:17, petah <lua@laufenberg.ch> wrote:
> > > Maybe split it into Lua-users and Lua-dev (or Lua-sterile-debates :). Feel free \
> > > to debate my opinion to death -- you'll just be making my point :)
> > 
> > This has come up a couple of times before, have a search for the
> > (multiple) threads with subject "Lua Tutor List"
> > It gets brought up again every 6 months or so, always with the answer
> > being a no.
> 
> Signal/noise has gotten much worse over the last 6 months.
> 
> F.ex. the thread "new empty value/type in Lua" and its offshoot "Empty? No. Array? \
> No. Has? Yes" have 234 posts. "[ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work1) now available" + offshoot \
> "Lua 5.3 work1 Considering math.isinteger or type()" stand at 237 posts (so far),

I think a separate problem is that people do not change subject lines when the \
subject changes. If you're using a modern mail client[1] you don't lose threading \
when the subject line changes. I do find that when I fix the subject in the middle of \
a generic thread I get more and more useful responses.

> What's the posts/thread or posts/day ceiling before exodus? 500? 1000? NaN?

Whose exodus?

A zillion years ago (OK, twenty), a number of experts were complaining about the \
amount of newbie questions and spammy discussions on a mailing list called moo-cows. \
I didn't want them to unsubscribe; they knew a lot more than I did. Since I knew \
their taste, I built and ran a curated list called clue-cows. If I thought it was \
something they would have wanted to read, I bounced a moo-cows messages to clue-cows. \
In some sense it wasn't actually a mailing list, since you couldn't send messages \
To/Cc it. It really was a strict subset of the messages posted to moo-cows. I invited \
other people to run their own versions if they didn't like my taste or thought I was \
being a jerk; if subscribers agreed, they'd switch.

Many people subscribed to both moo-cows and clue-cows; if they wanted to see what I \
wasn't forwarding, it was only a mail folder away.

There are other technologies for this kind of thing today I suppose, but the mail \
version still has some advantages. Of course, this was an era when I was pretty much \
glued to my mh mailbox anyway, so the total Jay-latency wasn't too bad.

Anyway, if you have a good feel for what is useful and what is noise, and you have \
some set of people interested in borrowing your judgment, you can contribute to those \
people and perhaps the lua-l mailing list as a whole this way.

Jay

[1]: Modern mail clients means, oh, about within the last twenty years.


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