Hi, being comparingly new to Gentoo I still wounder why the classical heart of every open source community is missing, a public news server. At least a news server is not offically announced on http://www.gentoo.org/ like forums, IRC and mailinglists. (I can read some, not all of the lists via infosun2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de.)
Well, there are mailinglists. But mailinglists send each message to everybody producing a lot of traffic overhead. As as result people are socially driven to reduce the amount of messages. The lists are dead early while IRC still is active. By this a lot of interesting solutions are lost to effective web search. The buzz in IRC doesn't result in a web searchable documentation. It is rubbish the moment after it was written. Also it is not everybodies taste only to send small messages and to paste elsewhere when the stuff exceeds 2 lines of code. Then there are some Gentoo web forums out there. Now that is really slow, moving tons of HTML for every single posting. Valuable information is scattered all around. Do we think intelligent people to limited to install a Thunderbird to read news, so that people are to driven to web forums like housewifes, that only know the web as webpages? When comparing Gentoo with other communities it has very good documentation but communication could be better. I am missing the heart of it. Al
