The Coq mailing list

[Benjamin Pierce <bcpierce AT cis.upenn.edu>]

To be fair, those resources have been politely pointed out at several points 
in the past couple of weeks, and people including Alexandre have supplemented 
those pointers with helpful specific responses.

We do need to somehow maintain a balance between helpfully answering 
newcomers' questions and allowing the list to become flooded with them, and I 
think there's a general sense that we've gone a bit too far toward the latter 
recently.  Maybe it would help if we could articulate some sort of shared 
expectation about what rate of posting questions to the list is considered 
appropriate (e.g. something like a question a week, on average?), so that we 
can politely let people know when they are using too much of the shared 
resource?

Another solution is to appoint a few moderators and ask them to undertake 
this task for the rest of us.

        - Benjamin

On Nov 26, 2011, at 9:18, Greg Morrisett 
<greg AT eecs.harvard.edu>
 wrote:

> This isn't a very welcoming attitude if you want to grow the Coq 
> community.  Perhaps we should have some ready canned responses that
> point people to resources (e.g., the FAQ, SF, CPDT, the IRC, etc.) 
> but in a polite fashion.
> 
> -Greg
> 
> On Nov 24, 2011, at 10:55 AM, Alexandre Pilkiewicz wrote:
> 
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> Can we try to stop feeding the troll by answering obviously trivial
>> questions? No answers are ever read, nor any documentation, advice,
>> proof, or anything. It's therefore a lost of time for everyone, and
>> useless noise on the list. And private answers are similarly useless,
>> since they are obviously not read either, but resent to the entire
>> list. The only solution is to just bite our fingers, and not answers.
>> 
>> Thanks a lot,
>> 
>> Alexandre Pilkiewicz
>