[members-discuss] Is mailing list become too small for RIPE?

Hello,
> On 19.02.2016, at 12:45, Lu Heng <h.lu at anytimechinese.com> wrote:
> 
> With overwhelming mail traffic for past few days, I just realise one
> thing that I'd like to share with fellow colleagues.
> 
> Now we have 13,000 members, and keep growing at 2000 member a year,
> with all those amount of active discussion, maybe maillng is not such
> a good idea for such big group, maybe Forum …
...
> Let me know what everybody thinks.

I don’t do Forums. They are only neat, if there is a good community manager. 
(moving off-topic posts, deleting spam, etc. etc.)
e-Mail needs discipline, or a client like gmail, that does the clean up for you (minus the privacy).

The problem is not the size, I would guess lists like the LKML have more members. It is the automatic subscription.
On the other hand, the members won’t find this list.

So maybe each members contact needs to be on here, but needs a good welcome package, including the do’s and don’ts on mailing lists. Seems to be forgotten knowledge these days.

QAs could move to a stackoverflow-like site, where the bad info is weeded out by the community votes, but discussion needs the raw character of e-Mail: you can’t simply delete a post made to the list. I can’t take back what is said in public as well.

So we might need a guide what is on, and what is off-topic on this list, and self regulate accordingly.

While I’m writing this, there is another e-Mail coming in with only one additional line posted on top. This is exactly the bad practice, that makes it unreadable. 
Weed out, no TOFU (TOp Post, FUll quote below) is helping to skim through hundreds of e-Mails. It is more work for the writer, but less for the reader. (Un)fortunately there are a lot of readers.

The same in a Forum. There are Posts with “What?” / “can you help me plz” as the only content.

just my two cents
Matthias