[cc-community] email volume: critical
Ale Fernandez
skoria at gmail.com
Fri Nov 23 07:14:16 EST 2007
Hi All,
Hope I can add a bit and not clog inboxes - What I've seen working well
in a lot of places is to partner a mailing list with a discussion board:
include it in the sig, and regularly encourage the use and reasons for
either.
The board can be long and talkative, and the list kept for announcements
and to encourage responses to threads in the bb... Clients like
thunderbird can show rss feeds from them too, appearing as mails. Boards
like PHPBB let you re-organise threads if they get unwieldly, very
easily! Hope that's a technical solution that part-solves it!
Ale
Terry Hancock wrote:
> Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 16:50 -0600, Terry Hancock wrote:
>> I'd also ask Terry, drew, and Greg (and me) to be mindful of posting
>> frequency. It is a good idea to wait a few hours or more before
>> replying to a new message, and to group replies into a single email when
>> appropriate.
>
> Okay, don't take this the wrong way, but I still don't get this.
>
> Why is one 300 line email easier to read than ten 30 line emails? ISTM
> that it's exactly the same amount of text either way.
>
> What's the point in disrupting the flow of conversation so as to batch
> comments? The thread is far more understandable if people stick to ONE
> SUBJECT PER POST. This is a rule from -- forever. I think my English
> teacher taught me to do this with typewritten business letters! (Long
> ago, when the world was young -- or at least I was). Yet there's this
> attitude like this is a bizarre new idea.
>
> Laundry list posts where somebody tries to respond out-of-sequence to a
> whole list of comments are usually a disaster. Most of the post gets
> ignored, the people it was intended for miss the message, and the thread
> that was being responded to goes off into la-la land, sometimes going
> into intricate arguments about something you didn't actually mean to say.
>
> I have done that before, but I almost always regretted it afterwards.*
>
> Sticking to one subject also makes it a lot easier for readers to ignore
> a sub-thread that they just don't care about.
>
> Yet people are complaining that the threads are "hard to follow"! I
> don't get that -- you're asking us to do things that make it HARDER to
> follow the threads:
>
> "Dang this fire is big, let's drown it with gasoline!"
>
> :-O
>
>> Soonish we'll be opening a web forum that people who just want to ask a
>> question will find easier to use
>
> The thing is, if people want to use any discussion node (regardless of
> technology) as a place to *ask* questions, then there has to be someone
> who will *answer* the questions.
>
> But why should anyone do that? What do the *answerers* get out of the
> relationship? Because you are not paying them, are you?
>
> The reality is that the answerers want to talk to each other. That's why
> they stick around. So if you want them to be there to answer your
> questions, you're going to have to let them do that.
>
> And if the answerers stop getting anything out of it, they'll just go
> elsewhere to hang out, leaving the askers with no one to ask.
>
> If people don't like that, and selfishly want things exactly their way,
> then there's always the paid consulting route.
>
> Otherwise, it's sort of like showing up at a pot luck, not bringing any
> food, and then complaining about what's being served (and that there's
> just too much of it).
>
> Cheers,
> Terry
>
> *I hope you've noticed that this email is an example of the kind of
> omnibus reply you are asking for. Will I regret this one?
>
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