Re: List traffic

Tom Lane wrote:
> I can see the need for small tightly-focused special lists.

How about a list devoted to discussions about reorganizing the lists?
It would get plenty of traffic, and then I could not subscribe to that
and have that many less messages to read.

There is only one viable solution to reduce list traffic: ban forever
everyone who top-posts or doesn't trim what they quote. Maybe some
other old-school Usenet rules too--can we ban those with incorrectly
formatted signatures and finally add proper bozo tagging? Praise Kibo.

Seriously though, I file admin/general/performance into one user
oriented folder, hackers/committers into a second, and all the non-code
ones (advocacy, www, docs) into a third. I don't think there's any way
to restructure those lists that will improve life for people who try to
keep up with most of them. I was traveling yesterday and busy today,
and now I'm 350 messages behind. No amount of rijiggering the lists
will change the fact that there's just that much activity happening
around PostgreSQL. You can move the messages around, but the same
number are going to show up, and people who want to keep up with
everything will have to cope with that. The best you can do is get
better support in your mail program for wiping out whole threads at
once, once you've realized you're not interested in them.

The only real argument to keep some more targeted lists is for the
benefit of the people who subscribe to them, not we the faithful, so
that they can have something that isn't a firehose of messages to sort
through. Is it helpful to novices that they can subscribe to a list
when they won't be overwhelmed by traffic, and can ask questions without
being too concerned about being harassed for being newbies? Probably.
Are there enough people interesting in performance topics alone to
justify a list targeted just to them? Certainly; I was only on that
list for a long time before joining any of the others. Are the
marketing oriented people subscribed only to advocacy and maybe announce
happy to avoid the rest of the lists? You bet.

Folding, say, performance or admin into general, one idea that pops up
sometimes, doesn't help those people--now they can only get the
firehose--and it doesn't help me, either. If you can keep up with
general, whether or not the other lists are also included in that or not
doesn't really matter. Ditto for hackers and the things you might try
and split out of it. It's just going to end up with more cross posting,
and the only thing I hate more than a mailbox full of messages is
discovering a chunk of them are dupes because of that.

I might like to see, for example, a user mailing list devoted strictly
to replication/clustering work with PostgreSQL. That's another topic I
think that people are going to want to ask about more in the near future
without getting overwhelmed. But, again, that's for their benefit.
I'll have to subscribe to that, too, and in reality it will probably
increase the amount of messages I read, because people will ask stuff
there that's already been covered on other lists, and vice-versa.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us