Hi, Shawn.
You've helped many users here and I am impressed by your obvious expertise
and your willingness to help others.
It was a frustrating newsgroup morning today. It seemed that every thread
here started with "Re:" in the Subject line and "I've got the same problem"
in the body of the message, with no clue as to what the "same" problem might
have been. And a quick check of the headers showed that each of the posts
were relayed here from the "vBulletin USENET gateway" or some similar
source.
So when I saw Gordon's post, I was ready to say, "Amen!" I don't usually
use the word "leach" (or "leech") in this context; I'm more likely to say
that other news servers "slurp" messages from here and relay them - and any
responses - back and forth, resulting in posts that are sometimes out of
sequence or lost. Today's posts were mostly moving the other direction -
from forums to these NGs - but with no context or not enough context to
allow us to understand the user's problem. We MVPs and other helpers here
WANT to help. That's why we're here. (I know that's why YOU are here, too,
Shawn.) But it's very frustrating to try to respond intelligently to such a
bare-naked post. After a dozen or so in a row, the frustration level gets
pretty high.
In your forum, Shawn, who decides WHICH posts get migrated to the MS server?
And how do you decide how much context to include?
I agree with your comments about the trolls and other "noise" in these
public NGs.
However, I agree that our members need to follow usenet etiquette
better, like quoting posts when they reply in these MS newsgroups.
But your members don't know that their posts are going to these MS
newsgroups! That's a big part of what causes our frustration. Your members
think they are in a private conversation and don't realize that you've
dropped a Public Address microphone down into their huddle! And we don't
realize that we are getting into the middle of a conversation until we check
the headers and see that the post is coming from a private forum. :>(
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 0908 in Win7 x64 6801)