Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Managing Unruly Newsgroups

The BIRT newsgroup has been a busy place lately. The newsgroup is averaging approximately 50 posts a day. At this rate we should reach 10,000 posts by the end of June, one year since the original release of the project.

Of course the effort to manage a newsgroup of this size is a daunting. The bigger issue is that it is very difficult to find the one nugget of information out there that will help people solve issues. It seems that the most expeditious approach is just to ask the question again.

I wonder if anyone has worked with any tools that allow better categorization and management of large newsgroups. Is there a way to assign posts to categories, short of creating a lot of sub-categories to the main group.

In particular does anyone have much experience with tagging of data? Has anyone ever used del.icio.us to manage a newsgroup? Is anyone currently managing tags to the BIRT newsgroup?

Any ideas would be great?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

why not a wiki? numerous amounts of posts i see to the newsgroups are iterations of similar how-to's.
a wiki full of how-to's and other such guides i suspect would lessen the demand on the newsgroup.