From: Rich Kulawiec (rsk@gsp.org)
Date: Sun Jan 09 2005 - 09:35:22 EST
I decided to see how the members of the Sun-Managers are doing -- in
terms of posting summaries, paying attention to the FAQ, actually
searching the archives prior to asking questions, etc.
So I kept all the list messages for roughly the last three months
of 2004, and then went through them. Here's what I found:
start date: Sep 22 2004
end date: Dec 31 2004
messages: 1289 (less copies of the FAQ, the
read-before-posting message, etc.)
summaries: 250
Which means that only about 20% (250/1289) of the questions asked
resulted in summaries subsequently showing up.
That's pathetic. [Some] people are receiving thousands of dollars worth
of free consulting advice here and can't even be bothered to spend an hour
repaying that advice by writing a proper summary (or even ANY summary,
even an illiterate and useless one) for the mutual benefit of everyone
on the list -- and everyone who will _be_ on the list at some point
down the road, and thus will presumably search the archives before
sending out their questions.
For the entire year 2004, there were 1238 summaries posted. By comparison:
2003: 1868 summaries
2002: 2329 summaries
2001: 2133 summaries
2000: 2084 summaries
The last time there were this few summaries was 1991 -- when there were
1060. And if the 20% summarization rate observed from mid-September to
the end of the year holds for the entire year (and it probably does)
then there should have been about 4300 summaries posted for the year.
Which means the list is about 3000 short. That's pathetic.
- Many subject lines are lame/non-indicative; apparently even the effort
required to think for a minute and compose one that means something in
the context of the problem is too much to ask. Examples from 4Q 2004:
/usr full
windows manager
V880
test (5 of those)
SUNWadm
Spam mail
hi (2 of those)
help (2 of those)
chown
Snoop
rcp
please help me
ldap
nagios
<blank> (9 of those)
- Questions answered in the fAQ turned up every couple of days.
- Questions answered in the archives turned up just about as fast --
and _would_ have come up even more often if more people had actually
written the summaries that they should have over the past several years.
(How many of the ~3000 missing summaries for 2004 would have answered
questions that others asked?)
- Still other questions amounted to no more than "please read the manual
page or search the documentation for me", which is ridiculous.
- And still other questions involved open-ended design problems (or
worthless "certifications", or product selections) that don't meet
the criteria for this list.
- And yet other questions were so badly written and omitted so much
vital information that it difficult to even ascertain what the problem
was. (I can understand the problems faced by non-English speakers,
and I sympathize. But many of whose native language *is* English
indulge in illiterate tripe (e.g. "2 u") that has no place in a
forum used by professionals.)
- Many of the summaries that were posted were completely inadequate:
they failed to recapitulate the problem, explain each of the suggested
solutions, provide details on which solution worked (if any), and so on.
Many were merely concatentations of responses. Others were even worse,
and included not only the full response text, but multiple copies of
the question, mail headers, boilerplate, and other extraneous material.
Some were posted so hastily that they failed to include replies sent
a mere 24-48 hours after the question -- thus often omitting the best,
or at least, an alternate, solution to the problem.
- Some rude and ignorant people are still running "vacation" programs
(years after doing so has been recognized as extremely stupid). We know
this because they're running _misconfigured_ or _broken_ vacation programs
that attempt to respond to mailing list traffic, thus needlessly annoying
anyone who sends traffic to the list.
- Other inexcusably rude people still insist on sending messages to
this *public* mailing list that have unenforceable, worthless legalese
(claiming *private* status for messages) attached to them. Look up
"adhesion" in a legal dictionary. And keep in mind that while the laws
of your country don't cross international borders, this mailing list
does. If the idiots in your legal department insist on maintaining the
fiction that any of this nonsense has any value, then please send your
messages to public mailing lists from addresses which don't carry that
boilerplate.
[ In fact, two days ago, someone managed to pull off both
of these at once: the list carried a "vacation" notice
which also carries boilerplate legalese. Charming. ]
The overall performance merits a D grade.
I can't fix it. Bill can't fix it (other than doing a hell of a lot more
work than he's already doing, and I'm not about to ask him to do that.)
Only we -- ALL OF US -- can fix it.
For my part, I plan to start keeping track of who does, and who does
not, post an acceptable summary in a timely manner -- say, a week or
ten days: long enough to gather all the responses and carefully
compose an intelligent, literate summary, but short enough to avoid
forgetting about it.
Expect to be called out if you don't. This community doesn't need
worthless parasites: it needs hard-working, cooperative participants
who recognize their obligation to repay what they get.
My suggestion is that others do the same, and that people who have
decided to be deliberately rude (see "vacation" programs and legalese
boilerplate above) be completely ignored: they don't deserve to have
any of their questions answered by professionals until they begin
behaving in a responsible, professional manner themselves.
I'm sure that other things can be done as well (and maybe other
people will have much better ideas than mine), but the bottom line is
that I'm _very_ tired of having lots of hard work squandered by selfish
jerks, and _very_ tired of noting the departure of some of the most
experienced and knowledgeable people on this list -- who, no doubt,
are equally frustrated. And since [mostly] quietly tolerating this
is clearly not a viable strategy: no more Mr. Nice Guy.
---Rsk
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