Please post to mailing lists
Posted by David N. Welton Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:10:00 GMT
Unfortunately, this quick note will most likely not reach the people it needs to, but it needs to be said in any case:
When contacting myself or other people who produce free software, please use the mailing list for the project in question unless you have a really good reason to keep the conversation private.
The reasons:
Other people can benefit from, and contribute to the conversation. They might also be more interested than I am in the problem at hand, or at least want to hear about how it's resolved.
It gets archived, and therefore people can find it via search engines in the future. This is critical when you want to be able to point people at archives that led to decisions that affect the project.
It creates more sense of 'community'. Most successful open source projects are not the fruit of only one person's labor. Perhaps they are initially, but at a certain point, everyone is better off if a community grows up around the project, and keeping conversations public helps that process along.
Please pass this along - hopefully people will start to get the idea.
You should reread that first bullet point. Looks like you added a sentence mid-way through another one.
I've gotten into the habit of just responding to private questions with this: http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html
Please allow non-subscribed people to post to your mailing lists.
Seriously, for some of the Python projects I visit, I end up having to post to planetpython.org via my blog in order to be noticed. That's because I usually can't post to the mailing list without subscribing, and I often can't find developer addresses on the project Web site. I understand why this is -- spam is annoying -- but I'll be damned if I'm going to sign up for a mailing list just to send a patch to it, or ask a simple question...
--titus
(effin' spammers... sigh)
Non-subscribed users should be modded through by a human that can both allow individual postings, as well as white-list senders. This isn't too onerous if you have software that's pretty good at sorting out spam - usually genuine emails will get through if they are real.