Re: List traffic

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> 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.

Only if they aren't hoping to get answers... What percentage of the
hackers and experts who trawl -general for questions to answer are
subscribed to -novices?

-general isn't subscriber-only posts is it?

> 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.

If they're interested in performance topics and they're not subscribed
to -general then they're missing *most* of what they're interested in
which doesn't take place on -performance. And most of what's on
-performance ends up being non-performance related questions anyways.

I think what I'm getting at is that we shouldn't have any lists for
traffic which could reasonably happen on -general. If it's a usage
question about postgres then it belongs in the same place regardless
of what feature or aspect of the usage it is -- otherwise it'll always
be some random subset of the relevant messages.

This won't actually cut down on list traffic for me and Simon but it
would help get people answers since they'll be posting to the same
place as everyone else.

> Are the marketing oriented people subscribed only to
> advocacy and maybe announce happy to avoid the rest of the lists?  You bet.

Well yeah. This is an actual discernible distinction. As evidence
I'llnote that there is no advocacy traffic on -general or other
mailing lists.

--
greg