Need for some guidelines to improve participation

[Bert Van de Poel]

Dear fellow repo-criteria-discuss members,

As some of you have remarked (including me), discussions here tend to 
fizzle before things are properly finished. I would like to point to an 
in my opinion clear explanation why this keeps happening and would like 
to hear from others if their limited participation stems from the same 
origins.

Specifically, I've noticed a tendency by some of the more active members 
of this list to answer a single email in several steps. Either splitting 
up a single email into several responses, or responding first to the 
original and then to some of the other reactions. This creates a thread 
structures that's far from linear and I would say even makes it truly 
look like a nine headed hydra. For the past three or so weekends I had 
planned to tackle my unread email from this list, but found myself ever 
more demotivated by just even vaguely trying to grasp who exactly has 
been responding to who and where discussions were going. As the thread 
view of the codeberg thread (attached as a screenshot to this email) 
illustrates, once you get behind a few days it's far from easy to catch up.

I fear that like me, many members here find it hard to motivate 
themselves to wade through split up argumentation. I would personally 
much prefer if discussions were kept more linear. If people feel like we 
should mix discussion of several criteria within a single thread, then I 
suggest we start completely new threads with a separate subject for each 
criteria, though I personally don't see why we couldn't all discuss them 
in one, linear thread. Of course, in practice it's far from realistic to 
always stay perfectly linear, but it is my belief that more people would 
get involved and give their opinion on this list if the discussions were 
more structured and linear.

I hope to hear from those members who have been less active, and see 
what their take on the matter is. If of course I'm alone in this concern 
I'll gladly keep my frustrations about this to myself, but if others 
have these same problems, I suggest we should adhere certain guidelines 
in the spirit of better participation and cooperation.

Kind regards,
Bert Van de Poel

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