Discussions and developing

[Mirko Liss]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, Brad Bollenbach wrote:

> The mere fact that one knows how to post to newsgroups implies at least a
> small degree of technical competency. Within that same degree of competency
> should be the understanding that one should at least make an attempt to find
> the FAQ for the relevant newsgroup before posting questions that have been
> asked over and over...and over. 

Complaints like that do in fact regularly come up in in almost 
*any* newsgroup or mailing list.

I guess there a three major approaches to deal with the 
low signal - to - noise - ratio of a many newsgroups:

a. Subdivide the group. 
Maybe comp.lang.python could spawn something like 
comp.lang.python.newusers, comp.lang.python.developers
or comp.lang.python.install .
Perhaps this will in fact be done, since the newsgroup's
traffic increases as Python gains popularity.

b. Apply threading, filtering or scoring mechanisms
to your newsreader.
There's something like a "food chain of excellence" in many 
diskussions. Experts discuss advanced topic with advanced users
but ignore common problems. Advanced users often volunteer 
answering questions of newbies, but choose to ignore esoteric 
threads.
Common news and mail readers feature very comfortable tools
to skew your personal horizont. Supposedly you have already
mentioned several useful keywords these programs can work with.

c. Be patient and suffer.
Useless talk do always happen. Complaints about other peoples` 
boring ideas might not help matters. 
We are all just humans out there.

I guess a combination of a., b. and c. might approximate
a solution to your problem.


Friendly regards,

Mirko Liss


PS: To those of you who aren't human: Please refrain from
sending me personal mail how to "get rich quick".
You will be brutally scored and filtered. ;-)