Re: List traffic

Tom Lane wrote:
> I can see the need for small tightly-focused special lists.

How about a list devoted to discussions about reorganizing the lists?  
It would get plenty of traffic, and then I could not subscribe to that 
and have that many less messages to read.

There is only one viable solution to reduce list traffic:  ban forever 
everyone who top-posts or doesn't trim what they quote.  Maybe some 
other old-school Usenet rules too--can we ban those with incorrectly 
formatted signatures and finally add proper bozo tagging?  Praise Kibo.

Seriously though, I file admin/general/performance into one user 
oriented folder, hackers/committers into a second, and all the non-code 
ones (advocacy, www, docs) into a third.  I don't think there's any way 
to restructure those lists that will improve life for people who try to 
keep up with most of them.  I was traveling yesterday and busy today, 
and now I'm 350 messages behind.  No amount of rijiggering the lists 
will change the fact that there's just that much activity happening 
around PostgreSQL.  You can move the messages around, but the same 
number are going to show up, and people who want to keep up with 
everything will have to cope with that.  The best you can do is get 
better support in your mail program for wiping out whole threads at 
once, once you've realized you're not interested in them.

The only real argument to keep some more targeted lists is for the 
benefit of the people who subscribe to them, not we the faithful, so 
that they can have something that isn't a firehose of messages to sort 
through.  Is it helpful to novices that they can subscribe to a list 
when they won't be overwhelmed by traffic, and can ask questions without 
being too concerned about being harassed for being newbies?  Probably.  
Are there enough people interesting in performance topics alone to 
justify a list targeted just to them?  Certainly; I was only on that 
list for a long time before joining any of the others.  Are the 
marketing oriented people subscribed only to advocacy and maybe announce 
happy to avoid the rest of the lists?  You bet.

Folding, say, performance or admin into general, one idea that pops up 
sometimes, doesn't help those people--now they can only get the 
firehose--and it doesn't help me, either.  If you can keep up with 
general, whether or not the other lists are also included in that or not 
doesn't really matter.  Ditto for hackers and the things you might try 
and split out of it.  It's just going to end up with more cross posting, 
and the only thing I hate more than a mailbox full of messages is 
discovering a chunk of them are dupes because of that.

I might like to see, for example, a user mailing list devoted strictly 
to replication/clustering work with PostgreSQL.  That's another topic I 
think that people are going to want to ask about more in the near future 
without getting overwhelmed.  But, again, that's for their benefit.  
I'll have to subscribe to that, too, and in reality it will probably 
increase the amount of messages I read, because people will ask stuff 
there that's already been covered on other lists, and vice-versa.

-- 
Greg Smith  2ndQuadrant US  Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com   www.2ndQuadrant.us