Re: Lurker

[glen e. p. ropella]

> Trey Fondon
> 
> PS  Any idea how many Lurkers are out there?

Hi Trey,

Chris did a good job of answering the questions... but,
I wanted to try to smoke out some more lurkers, if possible [grin].

There seems to be about 4 classes of users on swarm-support:
1) those who are interested, but haven't tried to use Swarm, yet,
2) those who have tried, minimally, and didn't spend much time
   trying to get Swarm installed, but are still interested,
3) those who have successfully installed Swarm and played with
   the provided demos, but haven't made their own models, and
4) those who are actively using Swarm

(#4 could probably be divided into users who are using modified
versions of the demos and users who have created their own apps
from scratch...)

Now, as far as the mailing list is concerned, we probably have lurkers
from all 4 classes.  (I'm defining "lurker" as "one who posts less
than once in, say, 4 months.)  In as much as we have "discussion" on
this list (as opposed to posts of stack traces and on-line debugging
sessions), that's quite understandable.  There simply aren't enough
issues raised that are of importance to the high-level use of Swarm to
warrant more discussion from lurker types 3 & 4.  Of course, types 1 &
2 will naturally be reticent about posting because they feel that the
list is primarily for *users* of Swarm (and how can one be a *user* if
it's not even installed, yet).

But, it's precisely these higher level discussions we will need to
see here before we can ever consider splitting the list into an
"installation/mechanics" list and a "modelling/theory" list.  And
members of all four of the above classes can engage in the latter.

glen