Re: [tlug] OT Posting

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 12/09/06, stephen@example.com <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> Note I'm not saying that there should be no public threads, just that
> summaries, whether of an off-list poll or of an on-list thread, are
> good things to have.

Indeed. One of my favourite lists, back when I was working with Sun
gear, was sunmanagers[1]. The list policy was:

1. Guy who needs help posts a detailed description of his problem.
2. People reply to him OFF-LIST!!!!
3. He writes back with a summary, prefixing the subject line with
[SOLVED] if the problem was solved.

The summaries were great, as long as people remembered to send them.
The cool thing about the list was, if you forgot a summary once, the
next time you asked a question on the list, you would get a couple
replies like: "I helped you last time. Did that work? Did you forget
to post a summary?" In this way, the leeches that just posted "OMG
srvr brkn help now URGENT PLZ!"-type shite a few times, and never
summarised for the rest of us, stopped getting help pretty quickly and
thus sodded off to Yahoo! Groups or something.

I am not saying that this is the model I want for TLUG; sunmanagers is
targetted at professional sysadmins who are under tremendous time
pressure to get that SunOS 4 box fixed yesterday, whereas TLUG is just
as much of a social club as it is a forum for getting help with our
computers.

But even so, summaries are highly encouraged here. If people take the
time to try and help you, it is the least you can do to summarise what
you tried, and hopefully what finally fixed the issue (if it got
fixed), for the sake of the archives.

Which will be opened to the public soon, by the way! :)

-Josh

[1] http://sunmanagers.org/