[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jules Bean]

Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> Yes, the sheer volume of posts is definitely becoming a problem (for me,
> at least).  All your suggestions for keeping the community polite and
> helpful are good.  But I wonder if there are also any useful technical
> tips for users like myself, who would like to be able to keep up, but
> feel they are gradually drowning?

Non-specific, I'm afraid, but technical advice:

Get a decent mailreader, and learn how to use it well. Spending two 
hours or so learning the keybindings/advanced features of your mail 
reader will pay itself back 100 times over.

Some people find that news readers are better than mail readers (really 
this is a feature of the programs, not the protocols; but they the 
programs tend to have different emphases). I believe the folks at gmane 
have setup a working two-way mail to news gateways for the haskell lists.

Most people find it good to have a threading feature. (A few people have 
broken email clients which break threads when they reply, fortunately 
not too many on this list. If you're one of them, please fix it!). 
Couple this with the ability to either 'really delete', or just 'hide' a 
thread from view if it's not interesting to you and you start to work 
through the volume.

It's stupid, but the the single feature that helps mail reading for me 
most of all is simply the fact that SPACE doubles up as 'page down in 
this email' and 'advance to next email in thread'. You can get through 
messages very fast this way.

I use thunderbird, FWIW. And I don't think it's a panacea, but it works 
for me. In the past I've used mutt with some success. The emacs-based 
mailreaders are very powerful, but you will need to spend some time 
learning the keys. There are plenty of other mail readers out there. 
(Mind you, some of them are truly dire).

Jules