Another technology slowly fades away.
Yesterday I dropped my membership in three of the five email lists I am subscribed to. I did so for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not reading them very often any more. This is due to the fact that I don't watch my personal email like a hawk any more -- sometimes it can be several days before I get back to it. There is also a volume issue. The CentOS list in particular is very noisy, and it is difficult to stay on top of it, even if all you are doing is deleting threads you don't care about. And frankly, I'm not sure I'm interested in the CentOS list in particular any more; too many questions are bumped as "not CentOS-specific", whatever that means, and there are too many flamewars over nothing.
The second reason is that for computer help and information, I now have two new homes: ServerFault.com and SuperUser.com. Part of the attraction is that both sites use a "reputation" value to show how the rest of the community rates you as a participant. Reputation has to be given by other users. Of course since it's measureable, everyone is jumping in and trying to game the system; however the side effect is that there's quite a strong community already which has a wide knowledgebase. Frequently you can get good (or at least usable) answers to your questions within a couple of hours at most.
This action leaves me with three mailing lists. A low-volume Autism list (oh, and I just remembered, an even lower-volume Autism list), a RedHat Kickstart list that I forgot about yesterday, and a svn-related list I've tried many times to get dropped from. The RedHat list will probably get dropped today, but I'll keep the Autism ones. If I have to, I'll just black-hole the svn-related list in the hopes that its list software is smart enough to drop me when I start bouncing everything back to it.
So goodbye mailing lists.
Between this, dropping my home server, moving my 'blogging and email to Google, and dropping my web hosting, I've sure made a lot of technology changes in the last year.
