On 10/8/2011 8:25 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: > I can honestly say that I've yet to find this a problem - either when > googling or going through list archives. Searches ALWAYS find lots of > extraneous material and have to be narrowed down. When looking for > technical information, things get very specific very quickly, which > tends to filter out off topic discussions very quickly.
This is not my experience, and likely the same for others. Most off topic noise is injected into legitimate threads as "conversation drift". Most off topic content isn't contained within posts that begin with an [OT] tag because most people aren't that considerate of others. I'm not talking about this list specifically, but all lists. For instance, you search and Google hits on the first post in a relevant thread. You read the first few posts and don't have the answer yet. Then the next 20 posts contain mostly off topic drift peppered with some on topic information. Finally toward the last few posts you might find the actual answer you're looking for as the thread comes back on topic. Maybe my experience here is different than others because I'm usually searching for things that are very new or simply obscure, and again, not necessarily specific to Debian. If you all are true believers in off topic posting, as you have so vigorously defended, why don't we _all_ commit ourselves to making one OT post per day and see where that leads? -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4e90a2f3.6040...@hardwarefreak.com
