[mythtv-users] Leaving...

[Brian Wood]

On Tuesday 17 February 2009 11:12:17 daniel-mythtvusers at mbx.zapto.org wrote:
> Darren Black wrote:

> It's a good point, isn't it?  The mailing list has such high volume that
> "noise" is inevitable.  What's the typical remedy to the situation where
> a mailing list is the victim of its own success?
>
> Maybe I'm off base and mailing lists should be able to scale
> indefinitely, but personally I find it hard to follow items of interest
> among so many mailings.

The "too many mailings" is easy to deal with, you can filter on the thread 
subject if it doesn't interest you, or delete it in a second.

A bigger problem is folks not trimming their posts properly. I recall one that 
had 11 list footers in it. This is harder to deal with, as sometimes the 
subject interests me, but wading through the stuff I've read before and 
multiple footers is a pain. Sometimes it takes several minutes to figure out 
if the post is worth reading, as the real information is buried so deeply.

Also, appropriate subjects would help, very often the subject has nothing to 
do with the actual message, either because a thread has been hijacked, or 
wandered off the original topic without the subject line being updated.

Lastly, long-winded descriptions  of people's system setups, when not relevant 
to the question, is tiresome. Sometimes I get the impression people are just 
bragging "Look What I can Afford", similar to what happens on some of the 
gamer-oriented lists (or so I've heard, I'd never read any of those).

Personally, the "what should I buy" type of question, while certainly 
understandable, especialy from a new or potential user, gets very old, 
especialy when the information is easy to find in the WiKi or the list 
archives.

Anyway, that's my pet peeve list, but in spite of it all, I find the list 
worth reading.

Ultimately the list belongs to Isaac, but he has not stepped in except in the 
most egregious cases, and in general seems to be pretty even-handed. I 
suspect he may regard the user's list as "all his nuts in one barrel", but 
that's OK with me.

-- 
beww
beww at beww.org