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Message-ID: <3AF7FB11.7E998C83@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 09:56:33 -0400
From: Earnie Boyd <earnie_boyd AT yahoo DOT com>
Reply-To: Cygwin Developers <cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com>
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To: cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: OT: A cygwin mailing list experiment
References: <20010507210729 DOT A32234 AT redhat DOT com>
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> Corinna and I have decided to be conspicuously absent from the cygwin
> mailing list for this week (at least).  I'd like to see what this does
> to the traffic there.
> 
> It has occurred to me that one of the interesting reasons for excessive
> traffic on the list is that people are *too* helpful sometimes.  If
> someone has a problem, there are often many attempts to help, resulting
> in multiple pieces of mail being sent to thousands of people.
> 

Interesting thoughts.

> The other result of being overly helpful is that people are not apt to
> use whatever resources they have available, regardless of the number of
> times that we say "use the archives", or we point people at the FAQ, or
> Earnie gives his suggestion to use google.com (which I particularly like
> because it should be a superset of information available on cygwin.com).
> 

Yes, I decided that giving the URL for the search would be more helpful
than researching the findings.  Also, there is a lot of archive history
about Cygwin that isn't in the Cygwin mail list.

> So, we're going to be conducting an experiment.  If you are a frequent
> contributor to the mailing list, I'd invite you to join in.  I'm really
> interested in seeing what happens.  Try not responding to anything other
> than direct questions for a week or two.  I think that the results will
> be interesting.
> 

OK, I'll participate in not participating beginning 10:00am EDT on May
8th.  To do your experiment justice IMO we should abstain through May
25th.

> Btw, the reason for doing this is that cygwin and cygwin-xfree are
> pretty much swamping the sources.redhat.com server.  I've tried a couple
> of times to compose mail asking for suggestions for reducing the
> traffic.  But, I couldn't bring myself to send it because I knew that it
> would either be ignored, or it would result in a flurry of clueless
> responses (not too cynical, am I?), which would aggravate the problem.
> 

No, rather factual.  The mentality of the cygwin list tends to be
newbies to the world of computer engineering with the only experience
being MS Office products.

Earnie.

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