Fedora Community: Under threat?

[D. D. Brierton]

I've been a RHL and FC user for quite some time. I've been on the
mailing lists, and had bugzilla accounts for a long time now. But this
mailing list is strangling itself. The volume is way too high. Look at
the beginning of the Fedora Project and see how many Red Hat engineers
regularly posted to this list, and now look at how many do (Tim Waugh
and Dave Jones make an occasional appearance here these days, and we're
lucky to have them). That's it. Who's driven them away? WE HAVE.

I work for a living. I have no idea what most of the other people on
this list do, but I often feel in a minority. This list should have a
narrow focus, restricted to using Fedora, and that's it. But instead we
have all manner of ridiculous threads, not all of them flame wars, that
go on and on and on. For the last couple of months I actually suspended
delivery from this list because I just couldn't cope with the volume.
Even as it is, I skim through messages, quite possibly missing things
that i could either learn from or help others with just because there is
too much traffic. Who's at fault? Well there is no one else to blame but
ourselves. We *are* the list. Either we decide to only respond to
genuine questions and issues, and ignore the trolls and flame-bait, or
we give into our urges and wreck this community completely. Given the
traffic the last couple of days I have myself considered unsubscribing.
Which is a shame, as whilst that flame war was going on I was helping
someone who was a complete newbie actually install Fedora. Shame on
everyone who perpetuated that total waste of time with so little
consideration for the silent majority on this list.

All of you can say, "If you don't like the heat get out of the kitchen",
but if the temperature gets any hotter so many people might leave that
the Fedora community might end up as one long slanging match like the
Debian community is. I assume that that is not what we want.

So could all of us think twice about what to reply to? If someone says
something stupid, or slags us off, or asks a question they could clearly
answer for themselves if they just tried, how about just ignoring them?
How about all of us exercising a little restraint?

Best, Darren

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D. D. Brierton            darren(a)dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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