mailing list noise, filtering (was Re: Getting Started with Lua + mailing list split)

[Jay Carlson <nop@...>]

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.