On Dec 3, 2019, at 11:17, Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer <arj.python@gmail.com> wrote:
I suggest we find a way to close a mail thread. Obviously we can't stop people from sending mails, but, like when a mod sees the topic has been juiced out, he closes the topic
This does already happen, if only by human process/convention, not technical enforcement. A mod says “We’re just going around in circles here, and it’s getting heated for no good reason, and there’s no actual proposal likely to come out of this, so stop responding unless you have something genuinely worth reopening over.” And I think this has worked well enough without technical enforcement, especially given how rarely it comes up—most threads just die out of their own accord. Occasionally you get a couple more replies over the next few days from people who hadn’t read to the end of the thread, and a filter could block those, but is that a big enough deal to be worth fixing?
It is normally difficult to say when a topic has been juiced out (the essentials have been said, with no new inputs). One might close the topic prematuraly. So, a time-based automatic closing might be better. Example: After 5 days, a topic is closed. A mod can extend the closing though.
Threads that actually end up going somewhere invariably last much longer than 5 days, and requiring a mod to manually extend them (especially repeatedly) would be wasted effort. And, worse, it would be a brand new opportunity to frequently get things wrong, and for people to get used to working around that (which would be trivial to do—just edit the subject), and pretty soon you’ve just got the original problem back but harder to manage than before, plus the threading on many of the actually useful threads is broken. Also, why do you want to encourage such a rush in the first place? The language evolves on 18-month cycles, and changes that aren’t pure library additions often take 3 cycles; if it takes a month to fully discuss an idea, who cares? If some people want to tune out after the first week, they can, and already do. And if someone like Serhiy or even Guido is away for a week, does that mean every thread started during that week should get resolved without their frequently crucial input?