From: David Alan Black Date: 2001-08-14T22:35:31+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:19692] Re: Ruby Newbie mailing list Hello -- On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Louis Brothers wrote: > The sticking point for me, and if I am understanding properly, for several > others, is that we don't want to break off into two lists. Perhaps though > we could add something to the subject of all the messages creating a > distinction between a self proclaimed newbie question and a more advanced > question. Heck, then you could run a filter on it if you didn't want to see > it. Perhaps there is even ML software that allows this to be done in a nice > manner... perhaps newbies could only see the newbie posts if they opted. > > But perhaps we're trying to solve a problem that could be better addressed > in different ways. Maybe we could advertise on the list that the first week > of every month is newbie question answering week where we all take extra > time to answer newbie questions of all shapes and sizes. I honestly think this is a solution in search of a problem. My advice would be: enjoy the nice balance and high signal-to-noise ratio in this group, nuby or otherwise, because it's a rarity. Anyone who's worried about asking excessively basic questions can try them out anonymously on the irc channel first :-) One thing to remember is that when it comes to the people who ask the kinds of questions that, for example, caused comp.lang.perl.misc to collapse under its own weight, *nothing* will stop them. Their behavior is on a trajectory which doesn't intersect with things like special flags in subject lines, first-week-of-month agreements, and so forth. There's no point planning for those people. If, on the other hand, we're talking about people who actually *would* participate in putting flags in subject lines, and such things, then we're talking about people whose judgement in asking questions, in my opinion, is very likely trustworthy in the first place. So then we don't need those things :-) David -- David Alan Black home: dblack@candle.superlink.net work: blackdav@shu.edu Web: http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav