[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| > Very timely! It's sad that haskell-cafe has so much noise now.
|
| I disagree with that characterisation. I don't mean to be pedantic, but
| I don't think haskell-cafe has lots of noise. I think it has lots of
| signal! Quite different.
|
| We don't have a problem (in my perception, at least) with the quality of
| either posts of responses. Not a general one, anyway. The only problem
| is that the volume is increasing; which is a problem if that makes it
| hard for valuable contributors to keep contributing

FWIW I agree with Jules's response here.  Yes, the traffic is increasing, but much of it is in long threads with multiple response, and email readers are good at letting you skip that if you don't want to read it.  Furthermore, we have the much-lower-bandwidth 'haskell at haskell.org' list, for those who want to see announcements and discussion starters, but don't want the full haskell-cafe experience.

We need at least one forum in which it's acceptable to ask anything, no matter how naive, and get polite replies.  (RTFM isn't polite; but "The answer is supposed to be documented here (\url); let us know if that doesn't answer your qn" is fine.)   I'd be sorry to lose that.

Simon