Re: moderation of abuse

From: Henrik Motakef (usenet-reply_at_henrik-motakef.de)
Date: 02/04/04 

Date: 04 Feb 2004 23:17:31 +0100

"Will Hartung" <willh@msoft.com> writes:

> A newbie newsgroup would be dead quiet, as basically newbies would live
> there. Then, in Google you'll see a zillion single post questions with no
> answers, because they're all newbies and don't know the answers. The
> "oldbies" wouldn't necessarily hang around there because it's mostly a one
> way interchange.

I agree, and there are more reasons for newbies no to ask
there. Generally, I think that it only makes sense to create
newsgroups based on topics, not on intended audience. If some change
in the comp.lang.lisp.* hierarchy would be in order, it would be the
removal of legacy groups like comp.lang.lisp.franz, ...x, ...mcl and
comp.lang.clos, all of which only contain some crossposted spam on my
server (except cll.franz, where some poor newbie did ask a question,
but apparently didn't get any answer.)

Having both the existing cll and a cll.moderated/cll.newbies would
only create confusion, without helping at all. I do not understand the
behaviour of some regulars towards stupid/frequently-asked/trollish
questions (just ignore them if they annoy you ferkrissake!), but I
don't think that creating a new group would be the right way to solve
this problem, or that this problem is in that desperate need of being
solved, actually (I also don't really understand the behaviour of some
newbies/frequently-asked-question-askers/troll either - if you get 1
helpfull and 2 annoying responses, get over it and appreciate the
helpful one, this is not paid customer support!).

> Cliki is all over this newsgroup. If someone sits and lurks here for a day
> or two, inevitably someone will mention the name "Cliki", or even a link.

Yes, but nobody lurks here for a day, or would even read a FAQ. At
least not everybody does.

The trick with having a good FAQ is not only that people do not ask
annoying questions, but that you can answer them with a single line
like "This is discussed in the FAQ, "3.1.24 Is there a free Lisp IDE
for Windows?"

Posting a FAQ regularly might help, because the smarter newbies might
actually have a look at it, but many won't. Big deal. The gain of very
few people reading it is small, but still bigger than the hassle for
everyone else - I expect cll regulars to be able to adjust their
scorefile appropriately if they are annoyed by periodic postings - I
have never seen any complaint about the monthly statistics posting,
for example, although it isn't exactly an interesting contribution to
discussions about the Lisp family of languages in the strict sense.

> Anyone even REMOTELY curious will Google or click the Cliki, and voila. We
> need a frequent "generic" Cliki post as much as we need a frequent Google
> post.

I did not think about a "generik" cliki post. I just wanted to imply
that, given a periodic FAQ-like posting, it would be stupid to include
anything but pointers to the two cliki pages listing available
implementations for the questions "What Lisp implementations are
available?".

> Google has freed USENET from a lot of these issues simply because it's beome
> the hive mind and Net dump. Why wait for a newsgroup FAQ posting when LISP
> FAQ in Google gets you the (an) answer that much faster?

Googling for "lisp faq" points you to the "old" cll faq, last updated
in 1997. It does answer a lot of questions I have never seen asked,
and fails to answer those that I have.

Searching for specific topics is still hard and inefficient, even if
Google made it better that it was before. The result for "lisp native
executable" certainly do not explain how to build native executables,
let alone explain why this might not be as important as a newbie might
think.

An up-to-date FAQ, periodically posted in this newsgroup, would
probably at least help with the former.

> Some concepts are difficult to query on, but many are not, and can be
> resolved through archives and web searches. Most are much more willing to
> answer questions that someone has not found the answer too before coming to
> c.l.l.
>
> Just like any other newsgroup, new participants needs simply spend a couple
> of days (or read a couple of days on Google) to get the flavor and links to
> resources that can be used before they ask anything.

In principle, I agree. But I have given up hope that people will
actually do this. People might spend half an hour researching
themselves before just asking whereever they expect an answer, but not
a couple of days. The problem is that this is more annoying for us
then for them, so the only sensible strategies are to either arrange
for them to find an answer in half an hour, or arrange for us to
provide an answer without creating an annoying endless megathread by
being able to just point to the relevant FAQ entry.