Re: List intolerance VS advocacy

["David Hodnett" <dwar@earthlink.net>]

> > I wasn't aware of a 'newbies' list until I saw this email. If there is in 
> > fact a list of this type, why is it not mentioned here:
> > http://openbsd.org/mail.html ??
> 
> Because you are bitching before reading the mailing list archives where this
> has been discussed to death many times.
> 

The fact that this keeps coming up despite being discussed in the 
mailing list archives, suggests that something is very very wrong.  I 
know there are two problems with the mailing list archives right now:

1) People assume that if it isn't mentioned, it doesn't exist.  If 
there's no newbie mailing list on the list of official oBSD lists, then 
they're not going to search the archives for references on it.  
Similarly, the list of FAQs doesn't point to 3rd party FAQs, etc etc.

This is incorrect behavior, I agree, so please don't flame me for it.  
It just so happens to be the way non-technical people think.

2) The oBSD mailing list archive search program treats the query 
phrase as one complete phrase by default.  Just about every other 
search program treats each word as a seperate query, by default.

I.e., our list looks for "OpenBSD PPPoE FAQ" whereas google 
breaks it down into +OpenBSD +PPPoE +FAQ and gets 
considerably more hits.

Plus, I don't know why our search engine insists on returning 
indexes of all messages sent within a day that happen to contain 
the subject we're looking for. 

Again, there is nothing wrong with the way it's set up now - it's just 
different from what non-technical people expect.  And as a result, 
they believe it is easier and faster to just come out and ask the 
question - rather than get used to a entirely different way of doing 
things.

I'd much rather correct the source of the problem, than to keep 
treating the same symptoms over and over again.

David
dwar@earthlink.net