Re: List traffic

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> 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.

+1.

> 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.

Yep.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company