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<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">Well, I was really
without an opinion one way or the other until I read this. For my
part, I have certainly asked a number of questions here, primarily
because they are heavy lifting questions and I found most of the
helpful souls in #drupal-support to be more of the site-building
types than bitheads, and when I first crossed paths with this list
it was apparently already 'polluted,' so I came away thinking this
was what it was for. And also, I freely admit that I found a lot
of pleasure in reading opinions on the best way to accomplish
things FROM people like Angie, Earl, Randy, Dave, Larry and the
other heavy hitters. In a world where, despite best intentions,
the architecture is not necessarily intuitive, the handbook often
falls short (yes, I need to help out there) and the demand on us
as developers leaves less and less time available to spend 2-3
hours hunting and reading to empower 5 minutes of coding, it was
one of the few places I've had a warm and fuzzy feeling. All of
that, though, was simply my ignorance as to what this list is
supposed to be. So, all of that said, I think those who
established it and used it while it was still being what was
intended ought to make the decision. I'm quite happy to seek
assistance wherever a place exists, and, now that I know, excited
to think that there can again be a place, here or wherever you all
decide, for me to eavesdrop on the types of discussions that used
to occur here.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">Jeff</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">On 03/17/2011 10:58
PM, Angela Byron wrote:<br>
</p>
<blockquote
cite="mid:F2A4708A-34A5-4055-87BB-A9BE1AEE0402@webchick.net"
type="cite"><br>
<div>Well, that's essentially what this list has become, and why
most of the people who used to frequent the list back in
2005-2007 no longer do.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>It used to be that this list was for high-level strategical
discussions around core/contrib/d.o development, active
brainstorming on big problem solving, important announcements
that affected CVS (now Git) account holders, and those sort of
things. What we currently (badly) use "meta" issues and a
variety of fragmented groups on g.d.o for, was what this
development list was for at one time. Support questions were
directed to the forums or to IRC.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>However, over time, the volume of support requests coming
into this list for "Is there a module that does what I want?"
and "How come my code is broken?" have far out-stripped most
of the veterans' ability to ask, repeatedly, for them to be
taken off-list. And so most of them have by now vacated the
premises in favour of lower-traffic IRC channels like
#drupal-contribute or to <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://groups.drupal.org">groups.drupal.org</a> silos.
These mediums have now mostly taken over the core function the
mailing list used to, but in an ad-hoc, "you only know about
it if you happened to be there or if some kind soul wrote a
summary in the issue queue about it" fashion. This "support
creep" has been happening in lots of other places too over the
past couple of years: #drupal, issue queues, etc. and it all
only exacerbates the problem of the more dedicated and hard
working individuals withdrawing away from the larger community
in an attempt to maintain some sort of sanity. All of which is
*extremely* detrimental to our community, including the people
who need support. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I believe Randy's proposal is an attempt to rectify this
situation, and get this mailing list back to its roots, by
providing an alternate mechanism for both support and
important announcements. I don't agree that shuffling
contributors off of <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://Drupal.org">Drupal.org</a> is the answer (I
have a long-winded, ranty blog post about this I need to write
up sometime...), but I also frankly don't believe that this
list will ever overcome the stigma/reputation that's grown up
around it among the core group of contributors, even if we
were all to do a concerted effort to get the content back
under quality control. It's easier to just give up and call a
spade a spade (or, in this case, a development support list a
development support list). :(</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<br>
</div>
</blockquote>
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