[sldev] Mailing list etiquette?

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

As of this moment, there are 387 subscribers to the sldev mailing list. 
As you would expect with a big public mailing list, most of those people
don't post to the list.  Of course, a handful of people post a /lot/. 
That's ok; if you have something to say, you should say it.  However, I
also want to make sure that if someone has something to say that
everyone needs to read, that it gets read.  If there's too much to sort
through, that might not happen.

We've discussed the idea that we should split off separate mailing
lists.  In particular, there are two different proposals:
sldev-contributors - for those that have signed contribution agreements:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-30

sldev-policy - for legal and policy issues
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-44

I've resisted going down that path, because I think that the groupings
we want are going to be more fluid than is practical to keep up with
(one day we'll want to split off policy, the next day we'll want to
split off caching discussions, etc).

I'd like to keep things almost the way that they are, but introduce new
guidelines:

*  If a topic generates more than five replies in less than 24 hours,
it's time to redirect that conversation to one of our other tools,
either the wiki or the bug tracker.
*  If the topic is not specifically a Second Life development-related
topic (e.g. this email, or a licensing discussion), it should be
redirected to the wiki or the bug tracker immediately.  One post to
sldev per 48 hours should be sufficient to bring it to everyone's attention.
*  If after 48 hours, the topic seems to have died out on the alternate
forum, it's ok to reraise the issue on this mailing list, summarizing
the offlist conversation thus far, and calling for further comment in
the alternate forum.

I think this set of guidelines strike a good balance between making sure
that people have a large forum to raise and discuss a broad spectrum of
issues, while at the same time ensuring that the list doesn't become
overwhelmed with discussion on a single topic that may not be of
interest to everyone on the list.  Note that these aren't hard and fast
rules, but going too far outside of the guidelines will be frowned upon.

Thoughts?  In the interest of following my own guidelines, I've set up a
wiki page here (please comment on the wiki page rather than this list):
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:SLDev

Thanks
Rob


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