[volunteers] Carpool mailing list... er... progress report

[Darlene Wallach]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 11:23 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Andrew Fife (AFife at untangle.com):
>
> > if the carpool list hasn't ever really been used and it causes an admin
> > or resource burden....
>
> Hi, Andrew.   To answer your implied question:
>
> 1.  As already noted, it's not been used (except for Kai's single post
> asking if anyone else is on it, which went unanswered).
>
> 2.  It isn't a resource burden in any meaningful sense of that word.
>
> 3.  It's a very tiny listadmin burden, in the limited sense that its admin
> queue is yet another spam target and results in listadmin notices of
> held postings (spam), daily.
>
> I'm perfectly OK with it sitting there continuing to do nothing for the
> next five years, if people are stuck in the "Well, let's not delete it,
> because it's for a good cause and somebody might, some day, want to use
> it" mode.  Your opinion, please:  What would you think is an appropriate
> number of years of continuous near-zero activity before that particular
> mailing list should be reasonably judged a bad idea and removed?  The
> record stands at two years, at present.
>

I am of the opinion that two years is plenty of time to reasonably judge
that an email list should be removed/deleted.

>
> I am, in fact, very curious about what are the appropriate criteria, in
> the opinion of our various active volunteers, for what _is_ considered a
> useful mailing list -- because we can in fact create an almost arbitrary
> number of additional ones.  If people think that Carpool is a worthwhile
> mailing list despite having almost no membership, only one
> (non-substantive) posting in two years with no responses, and zero
> success at its mission, we can certainly create additioanl lists that
> meet those same criteria.


I am of the opinion that a "useful" mailing list has some "meaningful"
traffic at least more than once a year and probably much more than that to
make it worthwhile being administered/maintained and whatever else is
associated with email lists.


>
> (And also, conversely, I'm curious about people's criteria for
> determining what is a useless mailing list.)
>
> I'm far more interested in the answers to those questions about people's
> _actual views_ than I am in knowning which actions on my part people
> around here "would support".
>  <http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/volunteers>
>

Darlene Wallach
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