What if we had an auto-approving moderator for the group?
I still think it would get slimy in short order. 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. Also, people figure out the gimicks of moderation pretty quickly.
Regarding spam, I'll be posting to USENET whether there is a Squeak group or not, so it doesn't much matter to me. Is anyone completely boycotting USENET?
If it weren't in high demand by our customers, I would drop it on the spot given the degree to which pain of maintenance outweighs the qual- ity of majority of material.
In short, this list isn't losing by any stretch of the imagination. I strongly think too much exposure might be a very bad thing. A stroll down a quite lane is pleasant, a stroll down an interstate is a wholly different matter.
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
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org