How to Help Mailing Lists Help Readers (Results of Recent Data Analysis)

How to Help Mailing Lists Help Readers (Results of Recent Data Analysis):

This second, independent experiment reinforced my conviction that:

Although mailing lists and newsgroups provide valuable support, a large percentage of questioners don’t get the information they ask for.

Many users have inadequate background knowledge, a condition that cannot be addressed on the mailing list and that leads to frustration for both the questioners and those trying to help them.

Mailing lists could be better integrated with the more formal documentation sources offered by projects, such as Frequently Asked Questions lists and wikis.

Users need better search tools and ways to find relevant documentation, so they don’t depend so much on questions on mailing lists.

This matches, pretty much perfectly, my experiences when running lists.apple.com and more or less overseeing the developer discussions at Apple.

For a technical mailing list to succeed, it needs a couple of things: it needs a good admin who can (and will) sort out the personalities and keep things focussed and on topic — and be aware that some of their best technical contributors might be the least patient with the newbies, and try to manage the messes that will occur.

it needs the technical people with a willingness and ability to help. And once again, an admin who can differentiate between a willingness to help and an ability to, and to get the mis-information off the list or corrected as needed.

And it needs a good, solid knowledgebase. whether it’s a faq, a wiki, or some other form, it not only needs it, I think that the list needs someone responsible for feeding it. whether that’s an admin, or whether it’s a writer that has a part-time responsibility to sift a list and turn it into KBase articles, someone has to. the contributors won’t, and shouldn’t — their time is better used creating more content, not polishing up their writing (if they would in the first place). The admin might do that, but the hand of a good writer does wonders here.

And that kbase needs a killer search engine, dedicated to the content. one lesson I learned during that time was that while getting the data spidered in Google is a great way to drive new blood onto the lists, a good dedicated search engine is needed, also, and preferably one that lets you both search across all lists on the site, and focus on just one list. And be aware that not all search engines search well against primarily technical geekery like code fragments, because some algorithms see it as noise and exclude it (ditto numbering and stuff. you need to test the engines to see how well they work in your content world…)

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