On Sun, 30 May 2010, Gabriel - IP Guys wrote: > Just to answer the aspect of why people in IRC tell you to > go to a mailing list – because mailing list answers are more > permanent that IRC, and also, it spreads the knowledge of > the question, and the answer over a much wider time frame > rather than just the two to three sentences that are > involved in fixing your situation. You omit mentioning that (from tracking latencies to appearing) the CentOS site, wiki, MLs, CentOS' planet are all regularly trawled by major search engines. The Forum and the bug tracker are also indexed but less often. So an answer there in these non ephemeral 'gateway into being readily re-findable ... thus some of the extended posts I make > These days people treat IRC like a street market for info, > there are no rules other than do not paste more than 3 > lines! (pastebin is your friend) and you can say what you > like to who you like, and log off, without so much as > contributing to the community Drive-bys and externalities are a problem and under the old design the CentOS wiki was not such a pigsty; some other team members lobbied for a less OCD approach on what is in and off topic, and how 'spoon-feeding' was treated. The jury is still out on this new approach in my mind; I know I get push back from old-timers who preferred the higher signal to noise ratio, and want 'quality' back as a preferred metric over 'friendliness' ... > IRC has been around for a long time, but unless the irc > server is irc.(project domain name here).org then expect it > to be staffed by volunteers and people who may not have the > same focus as yourself The CentOS project has cloaks both for team members, and trusted sources in IRC nics to address the issue (think of the clerk at the local hardware store, wearing a distinctive over-vest to mark them ...) A quick: /whois (nick) <CR> can tell a lot -- Russ herrold