Hi James,
James L. wrote:
On 7/14/06, Bill W. [email protected] wrote:
I’m not interested in labeling that someone
might find demeaning,You’re seriously worried about this? Are we being trolled here?
I’m not worried about it, but I get the feeling from some of the
responses
that the ‘newbie’ label thing is a component of the objection to a more
focused list structure.
Bill
Hi James,
James L. wrote:
As nice as it would be, I’ve never seen a newbie area actually work. It
quickly degenerates into the “I didn’t bother to read any documentation so
please solve my problem for me” area.
I’m sorry now that I even used the word ‘newbie’ in my original post ;-(
It’s really not what I’m after. As I’ve said in other responses, I’m
suggesting that providing context via context-specific lists could help
posters get the kind of help they’re looking for by giving readers /
potential helpers an easier way to identify those posts they might be
able
to help with.
Maybe as a message board, with a simple credit system like the
Hibernate forums use it would stand a chance.
That’s an interesting approach. How long’s it been in use? Did it
start
out that way or did the list owners institute it later? Does it work
well
wrt turning newbies into contributors?
Thanks again!
Best regards,
Bill
Pete Y. wrote:
I propose that we split the list into two: one list for Rails related
discussion, and one in which to discuss splitting the list.
Point taken 
It wasn’t my intent to make the problem worse. But I guess maybe I did.
I’m done.
Thanks,
Bill
On 7/14/06, Chris T [email protected] wrote:
it would be good to have a
newbie area, where they wouldn’t be embarrassed to ask straightforward
questions
Are newbies are intimidated by this list? The core and advanced
developers who answer questions here or have in the past have been
helpful to me. The Ruby world is very friendly.
I think it would be great if newbies could learn to really boil their
questions down to the essence of their problem before posting. But
that’s part of being a newbie.
and also to clean up this list a bit.
But people will repost to the advanced list if they don’t find a
satisfactory solution on the newbie list. Then other newbies won’t see
the solution there because they only read the newbie list. This will
make searching the archives a bigger mess. Need to search multiple
archives.
If the list must split I’m more infavor of spliting by topic (eg
development, deployment, core, scriptaculous) then by level of
expertise.
On 7/14/06, Peter M. [email protected] wrote:
If the list must split I’m more infavor of spliting by topic (eg
development, deployment, core, scriptaculous) then by level of
expertise.
Please add to the topics something like “list for discussing Mac vs
Linux Distro vs Windows for development” and one good old “offtopic”
list
Peter M. wrote:
questions down to the essence of their problem before posting. But
If the list must split I’m more infavor of spliting by topic (eg
development, deployment, core, scriptaculous) then by level of
expertise.
Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
Splitting by expertise is hard to do. In my experience, most people
won’t know which experise level they belong too. And we’re getting
questions to rails-talk about simple ruby language issues already, which
makes me wonder if any questions ever will go to the right list if we
split it up.
–
Ola B. (http://ola-bini.blogspot.com)
JvYAML, RbYAML, JRuby and Jatha contributor
System Developer, Karolinska Institutet (http://www.ki.se)
OLogix Consulting (http://www.ologix.com)
“Yields falsehood when quined” yields falsehood when quined.
On 7/14/06, Bill W. [email protected] wrote:
On 7/14/06, Bill W. [email protected] wrote:
I’m not interested in labeling that someone
might find demeaning,You’re seriously worried about this? Are we being trolled here?
I’m not worried about it, but I get the feeling from some of the responses
that the ‘newbie’ label thing is a component of the objection to a more
focused list structure.
Seriously, this list is extremely n00b-friendly. If the label itself
is enough to scare people away, they should go back in time to the
heyday of comp.lang.perl.misc and deal with Abigail for a while.
Kids these days have it eeeeeasy.
– James
On 7/14/06, Bill W. [email protected] wrote:
Maybe as a message board, with a simple credit system like the
Hibernate forums use it would stand a chance.That’s an interesting approach. How long’s it been in use? Did it start
out that way or did the list owners institute it later? Does it work well
wrt turning newbies into contributors?
IIRC it was put into place in early 2005. It was not in place when
the message board was started. What happened was the developers and
core team members kept spending more and more time answering the same
questions over and over again, or simply ignoring the questions. Some
other would help answer, but generally it was a n00b flood of people
who didn’t bother to read the docs.
So they came up with the credit system. New posters can start 10
threads (one credit per thread). You can earn new credits by
answering questions. Anyone who starts a thread can award three
replies with a credit point. Some people, of which I was one, started
collecting points for the fun of it, resulting in a spreading of the
workload for answering basic questions. The easy questions are
low-hanging fruit. Lots of people would answer them quickly to get
the points. And at the same time, as the newbies run out of points,
they’re inclined to open the docs once in a while and answer some
questions on their own.
This had the result of leaving more time for the dev team to answer
the challenging questions, and generally made the board much better
(imo).
– James
Everyone might like to look at the original discussion:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/34137/focus=34247
Additionally, two great places to categorize your questions beyond the
[noob] or [OT] designators is:
Rails Forum: http://railsforum.com/
And additionally you may use credit-based:
Rails Weenie: http://rails.techno-weenie.net/
Doesn¹t this pretty much satisfy the needs?
–steve
In a way it would be ok. But reading all the posts here about this I
am missing one key element. The need. The reason for why the current
system is not working.
It’s not like this mailing list is overflooding with messages. It’s
got a healthy dose of messages and I find it quite easy to handle the
load of information.
On 7/14/06, Bill W. [email protected] wrote:
Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
–
On 7/14/06, Jon Gretar B. [email protected] wrote:
In a way it would be ok. But reading all the posts here about this I
am missing one key element. The need. The reason for why the current
system is not working.
It’s not like this mailing list is overflooding with messages. It’s
got a healthy dose of messages and I find it quite easy to handle the
load of information.
I don’t like the idea of splitting the list, but I disagree that the
amount of traffic is manageable. I use Gmail (like you?) so only see
the e-mails at the conversation level, but if I don’t go through them
at least once a day, I wind up with a backlog of page after page after
page of unread messages. During spring break I didn’t check my e-mail,
and it wasn’t until a week or so ago that I finally got through the
thousands of conversations.
Sincerely,
On 7/14/06, Deirdre Saoirse M. [email protected] wrote:
I guess you don’t have 30,000 unread messages in your rails mailbox like
I do.
I’m at over 10,000 unread threads, but with Gmail it’s very
manageable. I’ve been told that the DevLists search tool is going to
be improved at some point this year. Once that happens, I’ll most
likely switch to that and empty my Gmail archives.
On Fri, 14 Jul 2006, Jon Gretar B. wrote:
In a way it would be ok. But reading all the posts here about this I
am missing one key element. The need. The reason for why the current
system is not working.
It’s not like this mailing list is overflooding with messages. It’s
got a healthy dose of messages and I find it quite easy to handle the
load of information.
I guess you don’t have 30,000 unread messages in your rails mailbox like
I do.
I don’t see a need to split the list – I do read a fair chunk of it,
just
less than I used to.
On 7/14/06, James L. [email protected] wrote:
empty my Gmail archives.
How can I do that faster than just deleting 100 at a time?
Thanks,
Peter
On 7/14/06, Peter M. [email protected] wrote:
empty my Gmail archives.
How can I do that faster than just deleting 100 at a time?
Hook a local client up to it, pull them all down via POP.
On 7/14/06, Greg D. [email protected] wrote:
On 7/14/06, Peter M. [email protected] wrote:
empty my Gmail archives.
How can I do that faster than just deleting 100 at a time?
Hook a local client up to it, pull them all down via POP.
Thanks Greg. I imagine pulling down 20000 messages might take some time.
Peter
On 7/14/06, Peter M. [email protected] wrote:
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
If you go to a label, click “All” under the Select row above your
messages, the gray bar below will say, “You have selected 30 messages
with this label. Click her to select all messages with this label”,
and it will select all 10,000 of your messages that have the Rails
List label.
I use Gmail to deal with this list, and I find that healthy use of the
delete button makes everything manageable. A quick scan shows me which
threads require further attention… these get archived. The rest get
disappeared.
I find that whether a topic is a newbie no-brainer or something that
will
change the way you code forever, you’ll see it again. Just learn to let
go
As for splitting the list, this issue comes up on all lists
eventually.
From what I have seen, it is inevitably a bad move. Separating the people
who do know what is going on from the people who don’t helps the first
group
(who doesn’t necessarily need help) at the expense of the second (who
clearly do need help, even if it is just to be pointed to a useful book
or
website.)
If you’re on Windows and can use Pegasus32. I believe it still has the
ability to delete from server w/o downloading. Haven’t used it in
awhile
though.
-Larry
On 7/14/06, foobario [email protected] wrote:
I use Gmail to deal with this list, and I find that healthy use of the
delete button makes everything manageable. A quick scan shows me which
threads require further attention… these get archived. The rest get
disappeared.
I use gmail too. But I don’t delete anything. Using rules I tag
everything that comes under this list and many others as WebDev and
make the rule archive it automatically. I don’t mind that the WebDev
tag shows 10.445 unread messages as long as my inbox is empty.
The things I want to remember are then starred for reference.
I find that whether a topic is a newbie no-brainer or something that will
change the way you code forever, you’ll see it again. Just learn to let go
It’s just not in my way these messages. So I don’t bother wasting my
time deleting. It’s not like I’m running out of space. And I star
those I want to remember for the future.
As for splitting the list, this issue comes up on all lists eventually.
From what I have seen, it is inevitably a bad move. Separating the people
who do know what is going on from the people who don’t helps the first group
(who doesn’t necessarily need help) at the expense of the second (who
clearly do need help, even if it is just to be pointed to a useful book or
website.)
I agree.
–
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