FreeBSD-newbies shutting down? (was: no freebsd-beginners list?)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 16 April 2005 at 20:11:18 -0400, Brian Kinsey wrote:
> Your request to the freebsd-newbies mailing list
>
>     Subscription request
>
> has been rejected by the list moderator.  The moderator gave the following
> reason for rejecting your request:
>
> "The freebsd-newbies list is being shut down.  Please use freebsd-questions
> instead."
>
> Any questions or comments should be directed to the list administrator
> at:
>
>     freebsd-newbies-owner at freebsd.org

Background: the original charter for the list was a discussion place
for newbies.  It was being abused as a place to ask beginner's
technical questions.  It seems that this was your intention too:

On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 07:30:17PM -0400, Brian Kinsey wrote:
> I went to sign up for the freebsd beginners list and got a response
> that the list was closed and I should use freebsd-questions
> instead. It seems to me that a newbie list would be beneficial to
> many of us. I see a lot of very technical questions here and feel
> that my newbie questions would not be appreciated, especially since
> I have not read through the entire handbook yet ...

There are a number of problems with having two lists:

1.  To check if a question has been asked before, you need to check
    two different archives.
2.  To lurk and see answers to other people's questions, you also need
    to be on both lists.
3.  It's difficult for anybody to decide how complicated a question
    is.  If you're a newbie, it's doubly so.
4.  -newbies was intended for, well, newbies.  Most of the people
     capable of *answering* even a moderately simple question aren't
     on the list, so many of the answers going past were wildly
     inaccurate.  You can get inaccurate answers on -questions too,
     but it's not as frequent.

In summary, it seems less of a problem for you to put up with the
occasional RFTM than to get just plain bad advice.

Greg
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