Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:
> First, I certainly appreciate your reasoned and polite response along with
> your attempts to minimize problems caused by the forum->email gateway.
Thanks.
Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:
> My main gripe though is more with the non-level playing field created by a
> forum->email gateway. The fact that once in a while one sees an annoying
> and/or out-of-context post is more a symptom of this bigger issue.
I think that the RESPONSE to these posts is a symptom of a bigger issue as
well. Would it surprise you to learn that I have received a number of off-list
responses from people complaining about the incivility of some of the people on
this list and applauding me for bringing them to light? These messages are
from people that post via the mailing list, not the forum. I've looked at many
of the messages on this list and would tend to agree that some people on this
list can be downright rude in their responses to people.
I agree that many of the posters to the list from the forum have been mostly
questions and have not been active members of the community other than to ask
questions. I would suggest that this is what happens when someone asks a
question and the response to the question is rudeness, simply because they
asked via an interface that someone didn't like. Consider the poster in the
par2 thread, for example. Instead of saying "we have no idea what you're
talking about because you didn't give me enough info" you and Holger greeted
this new poster with sarcasm and ridicule. I mean, you took quite a lot of
time to compose a rather lengthy smart-ass comment to this poor person that had
no idea what they had done wrong. They may or may not learn the answer to
their problem, but they learn when they talk to the people on this list, some
of them are just rude. And they don't come back.
I talked to someone today who almost stopped using BackupPC due to the rudeness
I am mentioning. They literally forced themselves to stick with it, even
though they found some people in the community rather abrasive. Perhaps a more
civil attitude to all posters would result in what you're looking for.
[quote="Jeffrey J. Kosowsky"]
Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:
> I think a forum->email gateway creates a class of (potentially) *lazy* users
> who just see this as a place to ask questions rather than give back to the
> community.
That's what a minority of members in some other mailing lists where I did this
thought when I first did it. However, they found that when they embrace these
other users, they turn out to just be people that would rather use the web than
email. And some of them are downright smart and contribute quite a bit to the
community. The best example of this would be the NetBackup list. It's been
around for many years and has thousands of email users. Two years after I put
in the gateway, on any given day, 10-20% of the posts on the list (questions
and answers) come from Backup Central. It can totally work and does not create
the two classes of users that you are worried about.
However, if every time someone posts from Backup Central, someone from this
lists yells at them just for doing so, then you'll get exactly what you're
seeing: one time posters.
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