The title is misleading, inaccurate. Firstly it’s not just newsgroups, its forums too, and it’s linkedin, its blogs, its everywhere else people can ask questions.
Robert Scoble has this to say: The chat room/forum problem, you only need to read the first 1/2, unless you know what Friendfeed is – I don’t… Jimmy had this to say, specifically about forums.
I see this a lot in the Excel world, people to lazy to bother searching for an answer before just asking someone else to do it for them. What’s really amazing is how many people just do give a reply. I guess that’s a good thing?
My worry is that this breads bad behaviour. We all want to help people, but I fear we need to be a bit more selective? Maybe this is an option!
Related posts:
If you do scroll down in the Scoble article, he mentions Twitter lists, which can’t be joined. So is the solution invite-only forums?
Hi JP,
Is it that they can’t be joined or is it that they can’t be hammered by retards?
I think the point Scoble’s making is that after a while these things just get runined becase it becomes big and uncontrol able,… and with twitter you can’t do that?
The guys at Stack overflow talk about having tightly defined rules to try and do the same thing.
And they have meta for other stuff!
Ross
They can’t be joined. You set up your own “follow” list, and all the tweets from that person (good or bad) get echoed to the list. Just subscribe to the list if you want to see all the tweets from “related” people or topics in one place.
What about Elite(est) Excel, like “beautify people”, you get kicked out if people already there don’t like you! :-)
Hey I sent that link to excel-l last week and no one replied.
Some folks don’t know how to search or what to search for so its good to give them an answer directly. But in some ways training people to ask before thinking or trying themselves isn’t a great move.
some responders seem keen to maintain a high post rate too so they are happy to post the same cut n paste reply as many times as they can.
dunno what the answer is, perhaps we should just all publish what we know as and when we can and trust in search engine technology helping searchers find it. I quite like the blog format for this as readers can chip in. Maybe a wiki would be better? Stackoverflow maybe?
Yeah sorry bruv, I should have given you credit in the post somewhere!!!!!
Wiki’s dont really work IMHO, Stack is good, but the slight issues if that Excel questions are 90% simple ones – I dont object to the questios getting asked, just in the right place, and after at least some effort, the post on that blog I linked to are amazing (maybe too amazing…)!!!
Cheers Simon,
Ross
As for newsgroups and forums, some questions are challenging like puzzles. It’s fun, in a very perverse way, to come up with +500 char array formulas to do odd things.
I took up the practice of critiquing others’ responses when they offered really bad advice. [Who wants to be popular?!] That’s more fun than answering the problem.
There are very few Excel-related questions that haven’t already been answered in newsgroups, but it can be very difficult to search for them. Classic example is conditionally summing cell values that aren’t italicized. If you don’t know anything about conditional summing by formatting, you’re not likely to be able to figure out that its one range property call different than summing by color. OTOH, searching for sum conditional would generate thousands of hits of which fewer than 20% would be relevant.
Hi Harlan
>>I took up the practice of critiquing others’ responses when they offered really bad advice. [Who wants to be popular?!] That’s more fun than answering the problem.
I think that’s actually a good service, that helps every one right, just need to make sure it does not descend in to a argument!
I agree, I don’t dislike Newsgroups, I understand that often unless you know the answer finding it can be a real PITA, and newsgroups and forums, when used right are bloody excellent. We just need to “encourage” people to use them right! No replies to
“URGENT Very important Excel Question, answer now!!!”
I also find the comments on that blog post amazing. 58 homework questions and counting, over more than 2 years! Just think what it will look like in 10. It’s great that the blogger never answered a single one.
Yeah fairly amazing, there must be a question in a text book or something that uses the same phase or something! It clearly shows how some people think they can just get other people to do there work for them!