Hi Jeremy,
There's a section at the top of
http://wiki.ros.org/Support which talks about the mailing list. I've added a larger heading to make it more obvious.
A long time ago everyone asked questions on the ros-users mailing list, however as our scale grew that became unmanageable our inboxes were overflowing. We now service 25-30 questions per day on
answers.ros.org sometimes with several comments and alternative answers which would be potentially 100+ emails per day on the mailing list. Furthermore mailing list archives are not great for finding solutions quickly when searching.
Our goal is to keep ros-users as a place where we recommend everyone subscribe to get important messages and announcements which are relevant to the entire community. And it's also an appropriate place for general purpose discussions. Many discussions which are relevant to subcommunities are recommended to take place on our special interest groups:
http://wiki.ros.org/sig
There has even been requests to find ways to lower the current volume on this list for which we're also working on solutions for that.
Tully