About 20 years ago I run a mailing list for one of my open source projects of that time. I think there were two aspects that contributed towards its very helpfu

About 20 years ago I run a mailing list for one of my open source projects of that time. I think there were two aspects that contributed towards its very helpful atmosphere: a) There was no mailing list archive. b) I tried to answer as kindly as possible, even to very simple questions, trying to create a paradigm. There was also another reason behind not having an archive: I treated every question as a bug in the documentation, because if the documentation had been better, the person would not have had to ask in the first place. Especially when a similar question came up a second time, I thought hard about how I could improve the documentation to clarify the issue there.