On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 11:43:08PM +0000, Tyler Smith wrote: > > I think you missed Amy's point. It's great that there are > technical solutions to the OT problem. However, if we take that as > license to continue posting messages that are far, far removed from > the world of Debian, we are going to lose two very important groups of > users. > <sensible stuff - but snipped in the interests of space. > > Balanced against losing these two important groups of people, the loss > of one of thousands of venues for political/religious/philosophical > rants seems like a very small price to pay. > The situation appears, at first glance, to have got significantly worse in, say, the last six months or so BUT there have been other odd bursts of significant OT at other times in the past. Debian-devel also has its fair share of rants, less OT. Certainly, I, as a DD, hang around -user in case there are users whom I can help: large amounts of OT tend to get in the way - if I killfile OT threads, then I can't see if useful technical questions are being inadvertently answered when the OT itself goes OT by actually becoming useful again :)
> A little consideration would make this a better resource for all of > us. It was very eye-opening to see the gentoo list archives. There's a > lot of good info there, and it reflects well on the whole gentoo > community. Like it or not, all the rants that show up on debian-user > do not reflect well on us. I _suspect_ that Gentoo, as Debian was, is the second or third distribution that Linux users try out. The easy install of Debian (and Ubuntu) and a vastly increased publicity now means that we get new users who ask different questions - some of which would have been inconceivable five or ten years ago on this list. > All things considered, I can find other venues for my rants and > ramblings if that helps improve the quality of support offered by this > list. Ultimately noone can impose a code of conduct on anyone else, > but please give a little thought to the idea that your entertainment > is diminishing the pleasure of others, others who may, now or in future, > be able to help you out. > Agreed. It may be a good idea to add to the mailing lists code of conduct a couple of extra lines: A lot of questions asked on debian-user and debian-devel are asked regularly. Please consider searching using an Internet search engine and reading the mailing list archives, Debian install notes and Debian reference manual before you post. If you can't find the answer, it is very helpful to others to show that you have attempted at least some of the above and your degree of success. If you have a problem, please be prepared to give hardware/installed software and version information if requested to as part of the process of problem resolution. Politeness and precision in use of language both help to narrow down issues and constrain extraneous discussions and flame wars. If tempted to start or continue contentions threads, please consider moving these to private email or to debian-curiosa. Both debian-user and debian-devel are high-volume lists read by people worldwide: consideration should be given to the fact that the views and attitudes of others may differ from your own. Uust my 1p / 2c Andy > Tyler -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
