-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 15 January 2004 21:33, Florian Schmidt wrote: Let me add a few random thoughts here: I am asking myself: what are the differences between the means of communication mentioned above? What kind of problems do newbie users have with IRC, message boards, mailing lists and documentation? Things I like about mailing lists: You take time to sort out the problem. You won't hurry from one probable point of error to the other like you maybe would on IRC, and you can read some more documentation until an answer to your question comes back to you. There is a difference between being told to RTFM, STFW, STFU and HAND in a mailing list and being squashed by a bunch of users in a crowded IRC channel. Thoughts about IRC: It helps to formulate problems concisely. It is quick. It helps to not depend on suggestions, because odds are, there will be none. Compared with a mailing list, IRC is a pretty emotional kind of communication. How long does it take for newbies to sort out the obscure social art of successfully asking questions on IRC? Message boards: I am not a Gentoo fan anymore, but I really liked their approach to how step-by-step documentation and their communication infrastructure work together. That's just great for a lot of users. I remember that quite a few suggestions on the forum pages were very useful. Maybe someone familiar with the Gentoo community can tell me about the situation today, and if the mailing lists or the forum pages provide better solutions. The forum approach may be promising, but hey: There is this friendly tone, mutual respect and so many technical problems solved on LAU - and the postings come without a member status label, like they do on the most message boards, and they won't get removed by moderators. All this helps the troubled user to take some time and understand the problem without haste. To get back to the topic Dave was initially writing about, I think the forum approach is good for huge numbers of users, or good for a situation where the popularity of a project is increasing rapidly. I doubt that mixing both is a bad idea, because they are too different. 700 LAU readers - +10000 pageviews of Dave's columns. Wow. Let's make 'em all file bug reports, to name-drop another form of communication. Regards, - - Burkhard - -- Public key available here: <http://blackhole.pca.dfn.de:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xFD82303B> key FP 0A65 5E83 F44F 47A5 3DFC 19C5 7779 E411 FD82 303B

Hi, This is a questions of good indexing. Google is your friend. There are other reasons to not join a list. Not having good mail access, not wanting spam, mail-flooding, to name a few. All things considered you do have a point. But the problem still stands, the people being reached here is probably a minority of the people that are interested. There is room for improvement. To be clear, I would not want LAD/LAU to have more mail traffic than is already here. And I would most definitely not want to worsen the s/n. But I WOULD want all people that are into linux and music to have know where to turn when they have questions or propositions. It might be an unsolvable dilema, status quo is too good to abandon. Not all forums are filled with morons, and not all mailing lists are filled with bright intelligent people like us ;). The trend might exist though, reason probably being what I was aiming for, web-forums are much more accessible, attracts more people... and probably more morons ;) ... it's a fine line between heaven and hell. /Robert

On Saturday 17 January 2004 09:58, Robert Jonsson wrote: Speaking of mailing list archives, what happened to the good old days where you could just FTP a massive tarball of the last years messages and search through it on your own machine, using you own methods? It seems that for most mailing lists now, the only way to get at the archives is through a browser or search engine that is run on the server. Why is this? The information still has to be stored on the server, regardless. Larry Troxler

On Sunday 18 January 2004 12:19, Joern Nettingsmeier wrote: Oh, duh! I'm sorry for missing the obvious reason - I guess you can tell that I've never hosted web space before, huh?? I guess the answer is for the mailing lists to cell CD's of archives. I'd gladly pony up for such a thing. Nah, it was just a general note / question, not actually specific to the Linux audio list. That's all?? I actually thought it would be much more. Damn, then someone _does_ need to sell a CD filled with various mailing list archives, then. BTW with broadband accesss, I would gladly dl 100 megs, to escape the hell of the online search engine. My error, of course, was in ignoring the sever's bandwidth cost in providing such a tarball. Larry Troxler

TBH I think this is the nature of mailing-lists. I don't think you're unusual Rocco - I appreciate the thought you put into your mailings and therefore generally bother to read them :) There is a place for forums, they do act to service newbies and also people with peripheral interest or those who don't have good email access. You /can/ moderate them and you always have the choice to Not Go There. There are a couple of lists that I'm thinking of unsubscribing from, due to the high level of 'noise' in my inbox - The high level of 'savvy' on this list means that it has increased in usefulness to me as my knowledge has increased, so I shall stay tuned. Thank you all for being here. cheers tim hall On Saturday 17 January 2004 16:01, Rocco wrote: