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To: Pierre Weis <Pierre.Weis@inria.fr>
cc: garrigue@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp (Jacques Garrigue), caml-list@inria.fr
Reply-to: bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu
Subject: Re: Newsgroup for Caml? 
In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 15 Jun 2000 13:29:14 +0200.
             <200006151129.NAA05959@pauillac.inria.fr> 
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 08:53:39 EDT
Message-ID: <2844.961073619@saul.cis.upenn.edu>
From: "Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu>
Sender: weis

> > What about keeping a moderated caml-list mainly for announcements, the
> > newsgroup being there for questions and discussions?
> 
> Yes, but I would like a slightly more general mailing list, opened to
> suggestions (libraries and language design improvements). The rest
> (including comparison between Caml and whatever) being freeely posted
> to the unmoderated newsgroup.

I agree that the volume of traffic on the caml-list is close to
becoming a problem, but I'm not completely happy with the idea of an
unmoderated newsgroup: in my experience, they *always* fill up with
spam, off-topic discussions, and other kinds of garbage.  I would
personally not read such a newsgroup.  

One of the best things about the caml language at the moment is that
it has such a strong community of developers and power-users.
Maintaining a *high-quality* (= carefully moderated) channel of
communication is one of the most important ways of keeping this
community together.

If answering newbie questions is getting to be too much work, why not
redirect them to comp.lang.ml? -- after all, there are plenty of
newbie SML questions there.  

    -- B

P.S.  I do know that dealing with mailing list moderation takes time:
the Types list (www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/types) often gets 10 or 20
postings in a day, of which I usually end up rejecting or responding
myself to more than 2/3.  But having a high-signal-to-noise forum for
that community (like this one) seems valuable and I don't see any
other way to achieve it than somebody doing significant work on
filtering messages.

P.P.S.  Moving some or all of the caml-list discussions to a
*moderated* newsgroup might be worth considering (I agree that these
are easier to manage for readers), but I believe even moderated usenet
groups are pretty easy to spam.