I would like to argue against splitting the GAP forum for some practical
reasons.

If I look at the log of the listserver, I see that a large number of
messages (especially messages asking for help in installing GAP or asking
about possible bugs in GAP) are sent by subscribers who have only shortly
before subscribed. Those users will usually not be aware of the
etiquette of the GAP forum, especially since the README file says nothing
about two GAP forums. Thus I doubt that the splitting will be effective
for messages from such new subscribers.

Like Werner I expect that the amount of messages related to distribution,
installation, porting, etc. will decrease once everybody has got GAP 3.2.
Then most of the messages should again be mathematical queries (hopefully
not bug reports ;-).

The number of messages in the GAP forum is not that high, though I admit
that it has been steadily increasing. Also the subject lines are usually
quite informative, which makes it rather easy to kill uninteresting
messages.

I would however suggest the following.

Discussions, such as the discussion about GAP for OS/2 should, after the
initial message, be carried out by e-mail rather than in the GAP forum.
(I admit that I am such an offender myself and promise to use e-mail
rather than the GAP forum more often in the future ;-)

We write a FAQ (frequently asked questions with answers), containing
everybodies favorite question such as "Is there a version of GAP for the
Macintosh". This would be posted every two weeks and also e-mailed
automatically to new subscribers.

We could mandate a standard format for the subject line. E.g.,

"Does GAP run on <machine>?"
"Installation Problem on <machine>"
"Bug in <function>?"

then users with sufficiently intelligent mail readers can filter out
uninteresting stuff automatically.

Martin.

-- .- .-. - .. -.  .-.. --- ...- . ...  .- -. -. .. -.- .-
Martin Sch"onert,   Martin.Schoenert@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE,  +49 241 804551
Lehrstuhl D f"ur Mathematik, Templergraben 64, RWTH, D 51 Aachen, Germany