I’m probably not the only one frustrated by mailing lists and discussion groups

René Stein spoke for me in the second half of his post, where he tries to explain why he no longer contributes as often to discussion groups and mailing lists.

No FAQ. Beginners are welcome on any list, but it’s better to answer questions that have come up over and over in a standalone document, independent of the list, than to write the same answer directly to the list for each newcomer.

Amen! Repeated questions are the eternal plague of discussion groups. I’d guess I’ve answered questions about MySQL and character encoding ten times lately. Then again, if someone hasn’t learned to search, how will they learn to use a FAQ? It’s still better to point them to a FAQ URL than to tell them to please use the search.

There should be at least two lists, one for beginners’ questions and one for advanced ones. It’s no fun wading through an undifferentiated stream of emails, with one writer wrestling with web services and the WSDL specification and the very next struggling with basic C# syntax. Both answers matter just as much to the people who asked, but I don’t think the posts belong on the same list.

When there aren’t many questions in a day, mixing them is fine. When there are ten new threads a day, a split makes sense. The two main Java lists, Builder.cz and Java.cz, have already sorted themselves out to the point that beginners mostly post on Builder. How long will that natural balance last?

I counted roughly fifteen discussion groups in my mail client. There are more, but some are inactive. To be honest, besides the two Java groups, these days I follow at most two others. The rest keep coming through inertia and in case I want to look something up with Google Desktop Search. I only contribute to the Java ones now.

I used to be very active in JavaScript groups, but eventually I’d had my fill. The same posts kept coming up: why doesn’t document.all work, why doesn’t this code work in Mozilla, how can I open a file with JavaScript? An interesting advanced topic worth discussing came up maybe once every six months.

Related articles

• (23 March 2005, Dagblog) How to bury a discussion site alive
• (13 January 2004, Dagblog) How to ask a question in a discussion group