[CentOS] IRC telling you to go to mailing list - it's for good reason ....

[R P Herrold]

On Sun, 30 May 2010, Akemi Yagi wrote:

> Surprisingly, there were very few from the mailing lists in the first
> Google 50 hits.  As I mentioned there, the objective of the search is
> not to compare which is more "popular" but simply to present the fact
> that, when people go to Google and do a simple search, they tend to
> see Forum posts.  This in turn means we need to make sure there are no
> misleading or inappropriate answers.  So, you can help there, too.

Interesting observation, but the forum content is additive, 
and so filled with blind alleys for a indexing engine that 
cannot distinguish supposition and mistake from authoritative 
content.  Without the editor's pen to excise errors, we just 
have mass there; compare contra the wiki where there is at 
least the possibility of revision [What? R P Herrold liking 
some aspect of a wiki? Is there an impersonation?] and better 
(bug slower) feeding changes through the proper bug tracker 
[so that minor ephemeral edits to not get forgotten] into a 
long lived work (upstream 'man' and 'info' pages, the 
increasingly good upstream manuals)

Also I see a lot of 'boilerplate' in first responses in the 
forums adminishing people to read the instructions, and 
welcoming people which has the effect of increasing bulk but 
not adding light. I do not see merit in the fact that Google, 
for example, has 15000 hits for:
 	"site:centos.org welcome to the CentOS fora"
... and it is not at all clear that this is the correct plural 
to anyone but a pedant with a bit of grammar school Latin 
willing to confuse non-native speakers of English

-- Russ herrold