Re: spam in official comment lists

<david>
The problem with having a policy that the official lists take only
comments and not discussion is that if the WG put out several hundred
pages over five documents all on the same day, it is more or less
impossible to make clear "black and white" comments except for trivial
mistakes and typos. Almost any technical comments are going to be more
discussion points and requests for clarifications or suggestions of
possible other approaches. So either all discussion moves over to 
www-ql and xsl-list in which case currently none of it is officially
counted as a response to the WG or some discussion happens on the
comment lists or threads swap between lists which just gets confusing.
</david>

<max>
> Therefore, no discussion should happen on www-xml-query-comments, and
> the "spam-free" list for discussion has always been there: www-ql. 

Separating Comments and Discussion is hard to achieve, and requires a
lot of work from the moderator telling people off. And I tend to find
having both on the same list a good thing. I dare say that xsl-editors
and xpath-comments currently work well, with no spam (at least for you
guys ;), a reasonable amount of traffic, and not too many off-topic
posts (most of which I receive for moderation and I personally deal
with).
</max>

These are reasonable points, but alas, this not the way W3C comments
lists usually work (so, this is in fact the anomaly, www-xpath-comments
is afaik the only comments list that you can subscribe to and use 
for generic discussion). Changing things might lead to an improvement, but then 
we have all to be well aware that we have to start a discussion about changing 
the usual modus operandi, and make the exception not an exception any more.
Consider, there are reasons why things are the way they are now
(in particular, separating a specific comment/typo/error spotting etc 
that should be tagged by the wg as an issue and properly taken care
of and replied to, from a generic discussion thread).
So in a nutshell: this is well worth general discussion on the possible
reshaping of the comments list structure (and/or, in any case, making
the good propaganda so to minimize the possible confusion, 'cause note
that without confusion David's problem does not occur...). But until 
that happens, we'd keep the status quo.

-M

Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2002 08:16:07 UTC