Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoos community communication rant

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Al writes:

> being comparingly new to Gentoo I still wounder why the classical
> heart of every open source community is missing, a public news server.
> At least a news server is not offically announced on
> http://www.gentoo.org/ like forums, IRC and mailinglists. (I can read
> some, not all of the lists via infosun2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de.)
> 
> Well, there are mailinglists. But mailinglists send each message to
> everybody producing a lot of traffic overhead. As as result people are
> socially driven to reduce the amount of messages. The lists are dead
> early while IRC still is active.

Hmm, ist this really true? We have good bandwith nowadays, even Dale has 
DSL now, so I don't care about the extra traffic this mailing list 
creates. When it's too much to read, or threads do not interest me, I mark 
them as read, as I would with my news client. I'm using IMAP, so as with 
news, only the headers are downloaded, and the body comes when I select it 
to read. This is fast enough these days, years ago I used pop3, and 
downloaded all new news messages completely and read them in my local copy 
to speed things up. Which I sill like to do for news and mail, because 
then I can do full text searches.

What I am missing is more mailing lists. The gentoo-performance list hast 
just been closed due to too few traffic A pity, because now all those 
topics will show up here instead. Which would, to be true, not change a 
thing, because noone used gentoo-performance, but in an ideal world I 
think people would. But this is not an ideal world.


> Then there are some Gentoo web forums out there. Now that is really
> slow, moving tons of HTML for every single posting. Valuable
> information is scattered all around.

I don't use the forums much. It's not about the traffic, but I miss 
threading - I don't like to read a dozen of pages of a discussion. But 
then, I often just google some search terms, and google finds relevant 
postings. Some from the forum, some from archives of the mailing list. 
Works quite well. Although it is crazy to have the information scattered 
around in all those different places, and I woud prefer to have all this 
in some newsgroups instead. But I don't care too much about this.

> Do we think intelligent people to
> limited to install a Thunderbird to read news, so that people are to
> driven to web forums like housewifes, that only know the web as
> webpages?

No, but if people prefer the forums, even if there are better things, let 
them, you won't change their habits.

	Wonko