Talk:Communication / Mailing Lists

There has ben a lot of discussion about how to restructure the MailingLists.

The Problem

Donredman has described the probelm as follows:

• Since the end of last year some of the experts and developers of MB have started to lead discussions about new features outside of the UsersMailingList. As I periceve it, the reason for this is that the trafic on mb-users has been growing all the time. When someone mentions a possible new feature, then he gets a ton of ideas, suggestions etc. of which about half is pretty useless because it does not fit into the concept the developer thought of. So developers shed themselves off into circles where they only talk to people that have about the same degree of knowledge about MB. I have myself been in situations where I had to explain a lot of stuff on the UsersMailingList that I did not want to explain. I wanted a reply to a question. Instead I ended up explaining all the concepts around AdvancedRelationships.

The whole thread can be found in the archive.

While digging the email archives, I found that the issue already came up in April 2004 in this thread on mb-reltypes (a now obsolete list).

Solutions

There were a couple of proposals:

• Adding web-forums for the unexperienced users and leaving the UsersMailingList for the more experienced users.
• Adding more special purpose MailingLists
• Adding a gmane support for the mailing lists to make them more accessible.

The debate trailed off without a clear consensus. So Robert and Don decided to add an experts mailing list as a first step (which is now defunct).

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