[Zope-dev] mailing list 'noise'

[Karl Anderson]

Ken Manheimer <klm@digicool.com> writes:

> On Thu, 28 Sep 2000, Chris Withers wrote:
> 
> > Toby Dickenson wrote:
> > > I dont see this as a problem: You only create a new list when the
> > > traffic for that proposal gets too great for zope-dev. Threading is
> > > good enough before that point.
> > 
> > Yes, but zope-dev has a relatively high traffic load... Why should you
> > have to put up with all that 'noise' if you're only interested in posts
> > for your comparatively small discussion?
> 
> Yeah - maillists flow by, and not everyone can follow all the traffic all
> the time!! The cool thing about "content-based" mailling lists, where
> people can subscribe to notifications about changes in subthreads, is that
> you just subscribe to the part of the discussion that has your interests!!

I haven't understood this gripe ever since I started reading mail with
Gnus.  Before anyone groans, I'm not sure that Gnus is ready for
general use by anyone who doesn't want to learn elisp - but surely
there's anther reader with these features?

The point that I'm trying to make is that a mailing list has all the
strucure needed to keep abreast of an important thread.  I don't think
it's perfect when you can't afford to miss a single important article,
but it works great for general lists.

Gnus treats mail & news as the same, and allows you to score posters,
threads, messages, etc. both manually and adaptively.  Threads can be
presented by order of their score.  Adaptive scoring is what really
makes it work.  The normal reading commands - read article, kill
thread, save article, catchup (mark unread articles as read) can
affect the scores.  So, reading articles in a thread tends to make it
float to the top, and posters who contribute to well-read threads
elevate future threads that they contribute to.  The inverse for
killed threads, less so for caught up threads.

I can read comp.lang.python when it has 3000 unread articles, by
skimming 100-500 articles, reading some, catching up or killing the
rest, and saving other 2500 for later.  I draw in what I'm interested
in from the mass of unread articles first, each time, and the stuff
that I rarely get around to is the stuff that I don't miss.  Same with
rec.bicycles.soc - when the article count gets to 200-300, I read the
2-10 articles that I'm probably interested in, and miss the 95% which
is almost always noise.

That's why I resist moving to other fora.  I've never seen one that
lets me use better tools.

Okay, my download finished while I wrote this, back to work :)

-- 
Karl Anderson                          karl@digicool.com