Re: A maze of twisty mailing lists all the same

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 3:46 AM, Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 6:11 AM, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:
>> Because the poster chose to send it to pgsql-admin instead of
>> pgsql-general (or pgsql-bugs) very few of the usual suspects had a
>> chance to see it. 7 days later a question about a rather serious
>> database corruption problem had no responses. I've never understand
>> what the point of pgsql-admin is;  just about every question posted is
>> an "admin" question of some sort.
>
> I can't argue with that... but a counter argument is that merging
> lists would significantly increase the traffic on -general would may
> not be appreciated by the many people that are only subscribed to one
> or two of the affected lists. I would wager that the majority of
> people aren't subscribed to more than a small number of the available
> lists.

Yeah. I read -performance, -hackers, -bugs, but not -sql, -admin,
-general. Consolidating multiple mailing lists to increase viewership
of certain messages is only going to work if everyone who now follows
each of the smaller mailing lists does an equally good job following
the bigger one. That doesn't seem like a safe assumption.

I might be able to buy an argument that -admin is too fuzzy to be
readily distinguishable, although I don't really know since I don't
read it. But -performance seems to have a fairly well-defined charter
and it's a subset of messages I enjoy reading. Of course if some
performance questions get posted elsewhere, yeah, I'll miss them, but
oh well: reading every message on every topic hasn't seemed like a
good way to address that problem.

...Robert