From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius)
Subject: Re: Reducing traffic on c.o.l.
Organization: University of Helsinki
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 20:38:59 GMT

dthumim@athena.mit.edu (Daniel J Thumim) writes:
>Probably the least interesting posts are newbie questions and please for
>help.  Perhaps we can cut down on these by setting up separate help forums,
>and *advertising* them, here, in the [meta-]faq, with linux distributions,
>in the form of instructions for getting help... with posting to c.o.l.
>listed as a last resort only!

Since people don't read meta-faqs, faqs, readmes, man pages, and
anything else that answers their questions, except for direct replies
to questions posted to comp.os.linux, why would they read about all
these new, wonderful ways to get answers to their questions?

Well, actually there are an awful lot of people who _do_ read them,
but they aren't the problem, since they generally don't post to c.o.l
anyway.

Your idea is good, and I'd suggest something similar myself, except
that I don't think it will work very well in practise.  Trying to get
people to follow netiquette and behave like the intelligent, civilized
human beings they think they are, seems to be a doomed project, and
will probably only result in frustration for the people who do it.

Just about the only two ways to reduce traffic in a group on Usenet
seem to be a) make the group moderated (not an option for c.o.l, way
too much work for the moderator), or b) remove the group.

As for the suggestion that people should add [keywords] to their
subjects, I doubt that it works much better than trying to get people
to use descriptive subjects in general.  Is "[X] help" that much
better than a plain "help"?  Should it be preferred to "Logitech
busmouse not recogized by Xfree86 1.1"?  (I will ignore the fact that
most of the X questions here should go to comp.windows.x.i386unix,
since many of them are, in fact, also at least slightly relevant to
c.o.l.)

Besides, enforced keywords are a de-facto split, but implemented in a
crude and unpleasant manner.

>People should realize how many other people's time they are
>wasting...

Exactly, with 30000+ readers, if every people use just one second per
article, that is still a full working day in total.  And with the way
some people quote text, one has to scroll through several pages of
stuff that is not relevant to the actual purpose of the post, so the
one second is highly optimistic.

Just think about it, if you post an article that takes as little as
half a dozen seconds to process per reader, you are wasting an entire
work week.

And while we're computing, if you have a problem, read the FAQ,
manuals, and other documentation (such as a Unix book), you can often
find the answer in a matter of minutes.  If you post to comp.os.linux,
instead, you might not get an answer for a day or two.  Efficient, eh?

>Please, people, think before posting!

However, since _I_ am a good guy, _I_ don't have to so I'm going to
post this anyway.  ;-)

Please note: I am still not troubled by the volume as such, only by
the volume of noise, i.e. things that either don't belong here (IMHO,
of course), or things that would be solved by RTFMing.  I realize that
I may be in a better position in this regard than most, though.  And
before _another_ person accuses me of things I didn't do (thankfully
he did it in mail, so I could just ignore him), I'll note that I did
_not_, in fact, vote _against_ the new groups when the vote was held,
and I even went as far as advertising the vote in two issues Linux
News, and generally encouraging people to vote.  I did not want to
hear complaints afterwards that the "Linux gurus" tried to sabotage
the vote.  I also knew there would be a lot of bitter complaints by
unsatisfied people if the split failed (was I right or what?), and
hoped that if many people voted there would be clear margin either
way.  Unfortunately, the votes were fairly evenly distributed (several
hundred votes per group, and all but one failed the "more than 100 yes
votes than no votes" rule), and the result only indicates that the
c.o.l readership is (or was) pretty much evenly divided on the issue.

--
Lars.Wirzenius@helsinki.fi  (finger wirzeniu@klaava.helsinki.fi)
   MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it.
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux