Re:
Quicky exercise: look at the typical calibre of post here. Compare it with the mean post in say comp.lang.smalltalk or camp.lang.lisp. Another quicky: how many spams have we received for being part of this list.
I'm extremely happy with the high quality of postings to this list.
I get absolutely zero spam, so I'm fairly certain that the Squeak list is not a source of spam.
I'd prefer to keep the Squeak list in the form of one or more mailing lists, and NOT turn it into a usenet newsgroup.
If the list were divided, I'd probably read all the sublists, so it doesn't matter very much to me how it is partitioned. If the list were divided, I like Sam Adam's proposal:
- squeak-announce remains for general announcements, especially new version/platform availability.
- squeak-vm for all the VM implementers and their discussions
- squeak-library for all the talk on fixing and enhancing base classes (float hash, equality vs identity, collections, et.al.)
- squeak-apps for morphic, PWS, Siren,Draw80, etc.
- squeak for general info and questions, how tos, newbie tutorials, etc.
However, I think fewer categories would be even better, so I'd suggest combining "squeak-vm" and "squeak-library" into "squeak-system" and perhaps merging "squeak-apps" into "squeak".
The result would be just three lists:
* squeak-announce * squeak-system * squeak
The chief benefit would be that Squeak users wouldn't have to listen to chatter about how to improve the underlying system (class library and VM). I suspect the VM and library hackers would end up subscribing to all three lists, so this wouldn't be saving them any traffic. However, I believe most of the traffic is potentially of interest to such folks.
-- John