[texhax] LaTeX users mailing list

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2013-09-10 at 13:12:52 +0100, Philip Taylor wrote:

 > Xochitl CORMON wrote:
 > 
 > > I have the impression this mailing list is not really active if I
 > > compare to other mailing list I member of? Is that a wrong
 > > impression or is there other LaTeX users mailing list I should
 > > know about?
 > 
 > I think it is possible that some have migrated to Stack Exchange,
 > for reasons that are not personally clear to me.

Maybe people who have questions only occasionally don't want to
receive all the unrelated mails.  It's not necessary to be subscribed
to this list in order to ask questions but it's a matter of fact that
most people are not aware of it.

Furthermore, it's recommended to search the archives before asking a
question.  Unfortunately you'll find only [sometimes quite long]
threads there but what you are really interested in is a summary.
Stack Exchange is excellent in this respect, much better than the
mailing list archives.

Lars, the mailing list archives are scanned by Google too, BTW.

After all, most experts are still on this list and I don't have the
impression that many people migrated.  Most people who answer
questions at Stack Exchange are on texhax too. 

I doubt that there is less traffic on this list nowadays than there
was a decade ago.  Look at

  http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax

Archive         Downloadable version
-------------------------------------
August 2013:    [ Gzip'd Text 15 KB ]
July 2013:      [ Gzip'd Text 38 KB ]
June 2013:      [ Gzip'd Text 35 KB ]
[...]
November 2002:  [ Gzip'd Text 636 bytes ]
October 2002:   [ Gzip'd Text 2 KB ]
September 2002: [ Gzip'd Text 4 KB ]
August 2002:    [ Gzip'd Text 1 KB ]
May 2002:       [ Gzip'd Text 947 bytes ]

Not a single mail in June and July 2002.  Unthinkable nowadays!

And regarding newsgroups, there is obviously still a lot of activity on
de.comp.text.tex, at least. 

Xochitl, I don't know with which mailing list you compared texhax.
But this list is about TeX "only".  If you compare it with an Emacs
list, for example, you have to take into account that Emacs supports a
lot of other things, not only TeX.  Thus it's to be expected that
there is much more activity on the Emacs list.

Regards,
  Reinhard

 > You might like to investigate the TeX fora hosted there :
 > 
 > 	http://tex.stackexchange.com/

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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