Re: Newsgroup for Caml?

From: Benjamin C. Pierce (bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu)
Date: Thu Jun 15 2000 - 14:53:39 MET DST

  • Next message: Dave Berry: "RE: Newsgroup for Caml?"

    > > What about keeping a moderated caml-list mainly for announcements, the
    > > newsgroup being there for questions and discussions?
    >
    > Yes, but I would like a slightly more general mailing list, opened to
    > suggestions (libraries and language design improvements). The rest
    > (including comparison between Caml and whatever) being freeely posted
    > to the unmoderated newsgroup.

    I agree that the volume of traffic on the caml-list is close to
    becoming a problem, but I'm not completely happy with the idea of an
    unmoderated newsgroup: in my experience, they *always* fill up with
    spam, off-topic discussions, and other kinds of garbage. I would
    personally not read such a newsgroup.

    One of the best things about the caml language at the moment is that
    it has such a strong community of developers and power-users.
    Maintaining a *high-quality* (= carefully moderated) channel of
    communication is one of the most important ways of keeping this
    community together.

    If answering newbie questions is getting to be too much work, why not
    redirect them to comp.lang.ml? -- after all, there are plenty of
    newbie SML questions there.

        -- B

    P.S. I do know that dealing with mailing list moderation takes time:
    the Types list (www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/types) often gets 10 or 20
    postings in a day, of which I usually end up rejecting or responding
    myself to more than 2/3. But having a high-signal-to-noise forum for
    that community (like this one) seems valuable and I don't see any
    other way to achieve it than somebody doing significant work on
    filtering messages.

    P.P.S. Moving some or all of the caml-list discussions to a
    *moderated* newsgroup might be worth considering (I agree that these
    are easier to manage for readers), but I believe even moderated usenet
    groups are pretty easy to spam.



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