Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Ishmael Yavitz]

I wasn't going to get involved.  I really wasn't.  But I love
OCaml, I know how much hard work is involved (a sincere thank-
you to all of the INRIA group!) and I don't want to see this
group descend into a flamewar.

>You are aware that there already exist a ocaml-beginers list, do you ?
>Also this guy did crosspost to it, but the beginers list is
>subscription only though.

Thaddeus L. Olczyk also cross-posted to pragprog@yahoogroups.com,
the "Pragmatic Programmer"'s list.

Thaddeus L. Olczyk is a member of many lists on the internet,
and frequently he posts messages that erupt in similar
discussions.  For references, see below my signature.

Please stop responding to the thread.  The questions he has
raised have already been answered several times.

Friendly,

Ishmael Yavitz




References:

on comp.lang.ruby:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/news2/comp.lang.ruby/20258

on comp.lang.ml:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Olczyk+group:comp.lang.ml&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=amnjbb%24aak%241%40cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu&rnum=1

another from comp.lang.ml:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&frame=right&th=f052755dde29b479&seekm=amdh4q%243n0%241%40cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu#link10

or, simply search Google Groups:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=Thaddeus+Olczyk+rude


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[Caml-list] Moderation

[brogoff]

Is there any chance that it may be restored? It's removal has been disastrous, 
and I say that as someone who has had postings rejected. 

-- Brian


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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Georges Brun-Cottan]

>  Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 08:54:20 -0700 (PDT)
>  From: brogoff@speakeasy.net
>  Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
>  Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr
>  Precedence: bulk
>  X-Perlmx-Spam: SPAM=21%, Report=NO_REAL_NAME, X_AUTH_WARNING
>  
>  Is there any chance that it may be restored? It's removal has been disastrous, 
>  and I say that as someone who has had postings rejected. 
>  
>  -- Brian

I support this motion.

-- Georges Brun-Cottan
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> >  Is there any chance that it may be restored? It's removal has been
disastrous,
> >  and I say that as someone who has had postings rejected.
> >
> >  -- Brian
>
> I support this motion.
>

Moderating is perhaps not the best solution.
Actually the main problem is due to the community growth with many newbies
who need support.
In order to increase the signal/noise ratio, perhaps a mailling list split
should be done.

Here's a proposal for a split :
- general ( support , any post welcomed, of course many noise )
- beginners ( support for newbies )
- academic ( FP / algorithms / langage features discussions => something
like the previous moderated list )
- industrial ( for people interested in developing the industrial usage of
ocaml )

Of course such a splitting will only work if it comes with a real WILL and
label from the official team, and proper advertising on the Caml
website(s) - the "unofficial"aspect of the current beginners list is perhaps
the reason why people use the general list.

Nicolas Cannasse


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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Sven Luther]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 06:42:35PM +0200, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> > >  Is there any chance that it may be restored? It's removal has been
> disastrous,
> > >  and I say that as someone who has had postings rejected.
> > >
> > >  -- Brian
> >
> > I support this motion.
> >
> 
> Moderating is perhaps not the best solution.
> Actually the main problem is due to the community growth with many newbies
> who need support.
> In order to increase the signal/noise ratio, perhaps a mailling list split
> should be done.
> 
> Here's a proposal for a split :
> - general ( support , any post welcomed, of course many noise )
> - beginners ( support for newbies )
> - academic ( FP / algorithms / langage features discussions => something
> like the previous moderated list )
> - industrial ( for people interested in developing the industrial usage of

You are aware that there already exist a ocaml-beginers list, do you ?
Also this guy did crosspost to it, but the beginers list is subscription
only though.
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> You are aware that there already exist a ocaml-beginers list, do you ?

Yes I am, thanks Sven :)

Actually I was just pointing at the fact that the "unofficial" ( not INRIA
supported ) aspect of this list was perhaps causing it to be less used than
it should.

Nicolas Cannasse

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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Sven Luther]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 09:33:40PM +0200, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> > You are aware that there already exist a ocaml-beginers list, do you ?
> 
> Yes I am, thanks Sven :)
> 
> Actually I was just pointing at the fact that the "unofficial" ( not INRIA
> supported ) aspect of this list was perhaps causing it to be less used than
> it should.

Ah, ok, ..., yes, i agree with you on this, but maybe two lists is
enough, no need to proliferate more, i think, as for industrial users, i
guess the consortium has his own list or something such ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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RE: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Mattias Waldau]

Moderation is to much work, and therefor it was removed. 
Why not just a new announce mailing list, where only 
announcements of new packages and new releases are allowed.

The only really interesting entries lately was

mldonkey
ocaml-soap
icfp-result

/mattias

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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Alan Schmitt]

* Mattias Waldau (mattias.waldau@abc.se) wrote:
> Moderation is to much work, and therefor it was removed. 
> Why not just a new announce mailing list, where only 
> announcements of new packages and new releases are allowed.
> 
> The only really interesting entries lately was
> 
> mldonkey
> ocaml-soap
> icfp-result

You might then be interested in Caml Weekly News ... It's a weekly
summary of what I (subjectively) find objectively interesting on the
mailing list (all announcement, and some insightful discussion). It's
sent to the Linux Weekly News for inclusion in the development page, but
I also bcc people who ask me. So don't hesitate to ask ;-)

Best,

Alan

-- 
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Maxence Guesdon]

Hi,

> Moderation is to much work, and therefor it was removed. 
> Why not just a new announce mailing list, where only 
> announcements of new packages and new releases are allowed.
> 
> The only really interesting entries lately was
> 
> mldonkey
> ocaml-soap
> icfp-result

Such an announce list already exists : caml-announce@inria.fr
The messages posted to this address are received by all caml-list subscribers, with the [caml-announce]... header. Of course, someone has to send the message (usually the author of the software).

-- 
Maxence Guesdon
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 08:54:20AM -0700, brogoff@speakeasy.net wrote:
> Is there any chance that it may be restored? It's removal has been disastrous, 
> and I say that as someone who has had postings rejected. 

I disagree with moderation: it adds a lot of work for the moderator and
a possible lot of additional delay for readers.
Spam isn't a problem for this list and flamable/useless/off_topic
messages are really rare.

The hugeness reached by threads is another question and is related to
the actual size of the ocaml community, in such sense even a moderator
can hardly solve the question, expecially because I don't want a
moderator to cut off a thread because it is getting too big!

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli - undergraduate student of CS @ Univ. Bologna, Italy
zack@cs.unibo.it | ICQ# 33538863 | http://www.cs.unibo.it/~zacchiro
"I know you believe you understood what you think I said, but I am not
sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant!" -- G.Romney
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Xavier Leroy]

> Is there any chance that it may be restored? It's removal has been
> disastrous

I miss moderation too, but we won't find a volunteer willing to
moderate the list (too time consuming!), at least within the Caml
team.

Majordomo supports "selective moderation", though: messages matching
certain patterns require moderator approval.  This possibility has
been put to good use (for the first time) against Mr. Olczyk.
There are limits to the levels of cluelessness, aggressiveness and
trolling one can reach on a public forum.

My only advice to readers of this list would be to not feed the
trolls: don't even bother replying, or do it privately.

- Xavier Leroy
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Alessandro Baretta]

Xavier Leroy wrote:

> Majordomo supports "selective moderation", though: messages matching
> certain patterns require moderator approval.  This possibility has
> been put to good use (for the first time) against Mr. Olczyk.
> There are limits to the levels of cluelessness, aggressiveness and
> trolling one can reach on a public forum.

I was about to ask that he be killfiled from the list... Not 
politically correct, but practical. Good old Machiavelli...

Alex

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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[brogoff]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Xavier Leroy wrote:
> > Is there any chance that it may be restored? It's removal has been
> > disastrous
> 
> I miss moderation too, but we won't find a volunteer willing to
> moderate the list (too time consuming!), at least within the Caml
> team.

There are other possibilities, such as having a group of moderators taking 
messages out of a set and thus spreading the work. I assume the Caml team 
considered this and decided it wasn't worth the effort. I'll urge you to 
reconsider, but just once, since I don't want to start a moderation 
meta flamefest. 

Others posters have suggested even more segmentation of the Caml lists, such 
as industrial vs academic, but I think that's a really bad idea. Unlike some 
ill-behaved "industrial" programmers, I don't see this distinction as being 
a meaningful or interesting one. The problem as I see it is a decline in 
SNR (signal to noise ratio for the acronym impaired ;) since the end of 
moderation. A large part of that is probably beginner's questions, but the 
increasing number of hostile flames is ominous. 

Perhaps, viewed optimistically, this is the inevitable result of Caml's 
increasing popularity. 

-- Brian


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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Benjamin C. Pierce]

The main issue I see with the caml-list is not lack of moderation: like
everyone, I'd prefer to have the spam and trolls filtered a bit better,
but there's really not that much of that stuff.  The more serious problem
is the ever-increasing volume of *interesting* messages!

OCaml is a central tool in my work (right up there with Emacs and TeX
:-), and I feel it's quite important for me to stay on top of what's
happening in the community, participate in discussions of new features,
learn about dark corners and subtle gochas, find out about plans for the
future, etc.  But lately it's been getting to be a significant burden
even to scan message headers -- on some days, caml-list accounts for a
third of all the (non-spam) mail I receive.

Since the problem is essentially too much of a good thing, it's hard to
see what could be a complete solution.  But I think there are several
little steps that can help.  Having a separate caml-announce list is a
good step, and I hope people get (even more) in the habit of using it to
let others know about useful stuff.  I also wonder whether someone
(perhaps Alan Schmitt, who does something similar already?) could try
posting occasional "minutes" of the discussions on the list, so that
people like me could check in and see what's been going on without trying
to read every message.

Regards,

        Benjamin

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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Alan Schmitt]

* Benjamin C. Pierce (bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu) wrote:
> Since the problem is essentially too much of a good thing, it's hard to
> see what could be a complete solution.  But I think there are several
> little steps that can help.  Having a separate caml-announce list is a
> good step, and I hope people get (even more) in the habit of using it to
> let others know about useful stuff.  I also wonder whether someone
> (perhaps Alan Schmitt, who does something similar already?) could try
> posting occasional "minutes" of the discussions on the list, so that
> people like me could check in and see what's been going on without trying
> to read every message.

The 'Caml Weekly News' is supposed to give news of what's happening in
the ocaml world to the people reading the development page of the Linux
Weekly News. As I said previously, the way I select messages is very
subjective. For instance, here are the headers of the one I sent this
morning (it is sent every Tuesday morning, to be included in the lwn of
the following thursday):

1) AIFAD-1.0.2
2) MLdonkey 2.00
3) Operator overloading
4) OCaml-SOAP library : bug fixed
5) ICFP 2002 Programming Contest Write-up

Items 1, 2, and 4 are new software announcement, item 4 is some part of
the operator overloading discussion (which I found interesting), and
item 5 was mandatory since the web page says "O'Caml is the programming
tool of choice for discriminating hackers." ;-)

I'm really open to discussion to what I should include, and how I should
distribute this letter. At the moment I just have an alias file that I
manually update, and archives of the cwn are not online (I could put
them online if considered useful). I'm not sure about sending the cwn to
the list, since I basically quote messages there (and give pointers to
the archives when the discussion gets too long).

As concerns moderation, I'm strongly against, as it really slows down
some debates (or we would need a bunch of moderators in different time
zones ...), and as the number of unwelcomed messages is fairly low.

Alan

-- 
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Michael Vanier]

I tried accessing this, but was asked to subscribe at a fee.  Is there any
way to view the Caml Weekly News for free?

Mike

> Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 10:56:53 -0400
> From: Alan Schmitt <schmitta@cis.upenn.edu>
> 
> The 'Caml Weekly News' is supposed to give news of what's happening in
> the ocaml world to the people reading the development page of the Linux
> Weekly News. As I said previously, the way I select messages is very
> subjective. For instance, here are the headers of the one I sent this
> morning (it is sent every Tuesday morning, to be included in the lwn of
> the following thursday):
> 
> 1) AIFAD-1.0.2
> 2) MLdonkey 2.00
> 3) Operator overloading
> 4) OCaml-SOAP library : bug fixed
> 5) ICFP 2002 Programming Contest Write-up
> 
> Items 1, 2, and 4 are new software announcement, item 4 is some part of
> the operator overloading discussion (which I found interesting), and
> item 5 was mandatory since the web page says "O'Caml is the programming
> tool of choice for discriminating hackers." ;-)
> 
> I'm really open to discussion to what I should include, and how I should
> distribute this letter. At the moment I just have an alias file that I
> manually update, and archives of the cwn are not online (I could put
> them online if considered useful). I'm not sure about sending the cwn to
> the list, since I basically quote messages there (and give pointers to
> the archives when the discussion gets too long).
> 
> As concerns moderation, I'm strongly against, as it really slows down
> some debates (or we would need a bunch of moderators in different time
> zones ...), and as the number of unwelcomed messages is fairly low.
> 
> Alan
> 
> -- 
> The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Alan Schmitt]

* Michael Vanier (mvanier@cs.caltech.edu) wrote:
> 
> I tried accessing this, but was asked to subscribe at a fee.  Is there any
> way to view the Caml Weekly News for free?

Yes, you need to wait for a week (lwn was broke two months ago, so
instead of calling it a day, they decided that their weekly publication
would only be accessible for a fee for a week, then freely accessible).
Or you can ask me to put them online.

Best,

Alan

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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Didier Remy]

> Or you can ask me to put them online.

Alan, 

It seems that this is what poeple have been asking you for (without
explicitly saying so). At least, we could see what these summaries we have
been talking about for a week do look like...

Should I beg you? So, "Please, please, Alan, put them online!" :-)

Cheers,

        Didier
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Alan Schmitt]

;-)

Here you go:

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~aschmitt/cwn/

It's just a directory with all the text files. If someone knows a nice
and easy way to transform text files to html (mostly to make the links
as real ones), please tell me so.

Alan

* Didier Remy (Didier.Remy@inria.fr) wrote:
> > Or you can ask me to put them online.
> 
> Alan, 
> 
> It seems that this is what poeple have been asking you for (without
> explicitly saying so). At least, we could see what these summaries we have
> been talking about for a week do look like...
> 
> Should I beg you? So, "Please, please, Alan, put them online!" :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>         Didier
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Re: [Caml-list] Moderation

[Alan Schmitt]

* Alan Schmitt (schmitta@cis.upenn.edu) wrote:
> ;-)
> 
> Here you go:
> 
> http://pauillac.inria.fr/~aschmitt/cwn/
> 
> It's just a directory with all the text files. If someone knows a nice
> and easy way to transform text files to html (mostly to make the links
> as real ones), please tell me so.

Following the gentle push from a member of the caml team, I did a bit of
formatting. You'll find at the same address the htmlized archive. If
something doesn't look good, let me know (I just used the following vim
script:
fun! CwnHtml()
  execute("%s/>/\\>/g")
  execute("%s/</\\&lt;/g")
  execute("%s+\\(http://[^][(){}<>\" \t]*\\)+<a href=\"\\1\">\\1</a>+g")
  call append(0, "<html><body><pre>")
  call append(line("$"), "</pre></body></html>") 
  execute("w! %<.html")
endfun
)

Alan

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