a simple request

[Greg McCrory]

I didn't mean to blast entire paragraphs in the channel, I meant a link 
or two every so often to where helpful information can be found. It 
could be 30 minutes between blips.  I have myself sat in that channel 
for several hours without so much as a '.' coming through. 

I will admit, that I haven't been around much in the last few weeks, and 
I noticed last night there were a lot of new people in there.  I also 
noticed that the ATDT is showing links to new posts on jonobacon.org and 
andrewprice.me.uk, probably RSS feeds.  This is kind of what I was 
talking about.  Maybe 30 minutes is too often, maybe twice a day is 
better. 

All of this is in response to Wesley's rant about having to answer the 
same questions over and over again.  As Dustin said, it's par for the 
course.  There are several ways to deal with frequently asked questions:

1) Ignore the questions
2) Write a FAQ, and point people to it
3) Display notices of pertinent information at regular intervals
4) Configure a bot to automatically respond
 
Now that I consider the list above, #4 looks like the geekiest way to do 
it and it could be more fun too. :-)

Finally regarding this list.  A true mailing list should be configured 
to reply to the list.  If an email is sent to the list, the subject 
matter is presumed to be pertinent to the list.  If someone wants to 
reply to an individual they can do that, but it is a pain to have to do 
reply all and erase all the other addresses in the header so everyone 
won't get 2 copies.

...Just my 2 cents for the week. [stepping off soapbox]


Trey Brown wrote:
> Since I maintain the channel bot I figured I would give my opinion. I 
> really don't like the idea of disrupting all the discussion that takes 
> place in the channel with that type of message, it would be very 
> spammy, and I think the majority of the people that are in the channel 
> on a regular basis would agree. It would also be just another place we 
> would have to duplicate information that is readily available elsewhere.
>