To many posts not enough responders

  • Thread starter Thread starter Glen Jones MCSD
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Glen Jones MCSD

All,

I know the answer to this question, I just thought I would ask everyone
else.

Why don't more people respond to the questions?

There is not way the 15 or so regular responders can answer the mounting
number of questions.

Any thoughts on this?
 
Too many posts, very wrong, there can never be too many.
Not enough responders, perhaps, but there are very few posts that receive
no response whatsoever. And there are far more than 15 regulars. Some
may be less frequent than others, but I get a sense this group is teeming
with life.

If you get no response:
Wait a day, there are people being online at different times.

If you still get no response:
Repost the question (I usually only respond to posts written within 8
hours).
Try to specify the question using other words. It can be difficult to
grasp what you want sometimes.

If you receive a response:
....that perhaps also is the solution to your problem.
Thanks the group by responding to another question :)

There is loads of information in this group. Reading a question/answer
thread might give you valuable insight you may use later on. And
responding to a question might cause the questioner to respond to your
question in turn instead of leaving the group.

That said, noone should be obliged to answer. And you can therefore never
expect to get an answer to your problem either. But even if you never get
a response to your question, don't give up on the group.
 
Glen Jones MCSD said:
All,

I know the answer to this question, I just thought I would ask everyone
else.

Why don't more people respond to the questions?
Click to expand...


Hi Glen,

Here's what I'm seeing. There are many questions being asked that don't
have much to do with the C# programming language, which is the purpose of
this group. When someone does ask a C# programming language question, they
often get several answers. Keep in mind that subjects such as Windows
Forms, ASP.NET, Web Services, etc. are all .NET technologies, but they are
not part of the C# programming language. In fact, there are newsgroups that
specialize in those technologies that would be more appropriate for many
questions. When I come to this group, I scan for C# related discussions,
and infrequently look at the other stuff. It is quite common for questions
that are off-topic to not be answered.

If you could, take another look. You'll probably see that many of the C#
programming language questions get multiple responses. In addition to
answers on C# programming language topics, you'll see detailed discussions
and clarifications/corrections, which IMO is good because it increases the
quality of the content.

There is a site, IIRC by one of the MVPs, that answers the question of "Why
didn't I get an answer?", that I think gives good insight into this
question. I don't remember the URL, so hopefully someone will post it.

Joe
 
Glen Jones MCSD said:
I know the answer to this question, I just thought I would ask everyone
else.

Why don't more people respond to the questions?

There is not way the 15 or so regular responders can answer the mounting
number of questions.

Any thoughts on this?
Click to expand...

Well, there don't seem to be *that* many questions which never get an
answer, in my experience.

As for why more people don't respond - I don't think very many people
see *answering* questions as a learning technique, which I certainly
do. Many people will only even look at technical newsgroups when
they've got a question, never to look for other people's questions. If
you're a .NET developer just as a job, rather than finding it
interesting in its own right, and you don't care that much about
learning things which aren't particularly focused on your current work,
there's no particularly good reason to hang around here. Me? I like
soaking it all up :) (There's nothing I like better than to see a
question which looks interesting but is on a topic I know nothing
about, leading to a bit of reading and experimentation to find an
answer.)
 
I couldn't have said it better!

I would add, though, that it appears that a lot of this is just pure
laziness. Many "newbies" think that if they can't figure it out in a
few minutes, just post to the newsgroup and all will be well. Well,
by doing that, they are just wasting bandwidth and valuable time
that could be spent looking through the DOCUMENTATION!

Documentation, what a novel idea!

A prime example would be the post about a "streamreader
ReadPreviousLine" method. What a joke. After reading that I could
think of at least five ways of solving that little problem right off the
bat, and I'm sure there are dozens. For goodness' sake, use a bit
of common sense before wasting our time with something like that!

Too many posts, very wrong, there can never be too many.
Not enough responders, perhaps, but there are very few posts that receive
no response whatsoever. And there are far more than 15 regulars. Some
may be less frequent than others, but I get a sense this group is teeming
with life.

If you get no response:
Wait a day, there are people being online at different times.

If you still get no response:
Repost the question (I usually only respond to posts written within 8
hours).
Try to specify the question using other words. It can be difficult to
grasp what you want sometimes.

If you receive a response:
....that perhaps also is the solution to your problem.
Thanks the group by responding to another question :)

There is loads of information in this group. Reading a question/answer
thread might give you valuable insight you may use later on. And
responding to a question might cause the questioner to respond to your
question in turn instead of leaving the group.

That said, noone should be obliged to answer. And you can therefore never
expect to get an answer to your problem either. But even if you never get
a response to your question, don't give up on the group.
 
Hi Gary,

While I do believe that we all become better coders when we RTFM, I'd never
discourage someone from asking a question that has already been answered in
the product documentation.

The fact that the documentation has answers in it is a testament to the hard
work of the documentation folks at Microsoft, who are truly some of the best
technical content authors and editors in the world. However, there is a
great deal of information in the documentation, tens of thousands of pages,
and a new person can hardly be expected to find all of the answers.
Sometimes basic concepts are hard to learn from online help. (I dare you to
learn Regular Expressions from the .NET class library descriptions).

The novice developers may "waste their bandwidth", as you say, but many of
the **Responders** on this group "cut their teeth" on these kinds of
questions. This gives practice to new responders, and builds confidence as
well as helping the original questioner. This builds the group, and helps
us all.

If you are a responder, and you come across a question that you feel is too
trivial to answer, then leave it. You don't waste your time by leaving it
alone. If you are a reader, and you come across a question that you hadn't
thought of, and someone else responded, perhaps you can learn. Once again,
there's no downside to this.

So, please, have patience with our imperfect shared community. No question
is too trivial, and no newbie is too lazy, for us all to benefit by the
interaction.

--- Nick Malik
MCSD, Technical Architect
former MVP
 
Nick Malik said:
While I do believe that we all become better coders when we RTFM, I'd
never discourage someone from asking a question that has already been
answered in the product documentation.
Click to expand...

I think that depends on whether or not they've actually looked first.
I'd discourage someone from asking a question just because they don't
think they'll find it in the docs, or after only 30 seconds of
searching the docs (and www.google.com and groups.google.com).

A while ago someone suggested in the Java groups that there could be
another group where you only asked a question (or only expected to have
your question answered, anyway) if you've done the research *and stated
in the post what that research entailed*.

(Similarly I guess I'd like a group of "problems with short but
complete programs demonstrating them", but I guess that's just a dream
:)
 
All,

I know the answer to this question, I just thought I would ask everyone
else.

Why don't more people respond to the questions?

There is not way the 15 or so regular responders can answer the mounting
number of questions.
Click to expand...

On top of what everyone else has said I would mention that the
language is new so there are not as many experts in all it's various
quirks as there would be for older languages.

People have had a lot of time to find out the problems with C++ or VB
not matter how infrequently that problem may occur or how isoteric the
area of programming it is in
there has not been so much time with C#
that means the chance of hitting a problem no one else has encountered
is higher and that sort of problem is harder for people to answer

I'd expect the number of regular responders to increase gradually as
language use goes up

Vin
 
If I looked at half the posts that I made when I first got into dotnet, they
definatly seemed to easy to ask, at least now they do. But at the time I
was stumped, didn't know where my resources were and needed a good push. I
would say the best help came not from the posts that gave the answers I was
looking for, but rather the replies that pointed me towards the articles and
resources to help me. And they still do.

I think the best resource out there is google. After being pointed to this
resource, which allows me to search these very posts, I always look up my
question in the groups prior to asking. Generally I find the help I need
because some one has already asked it.

[watch line breaks]
CSHARP group
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...roup=microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp

You can search just about every group directly from google.com
 
Vincent Finn said:
On top of what everyone else has said I would mention that the
language is new so there are not as many experts in all it's various
quirks as there would be for older languages.
Click to expand...

True. On the other hand, you certainly don't need to be an expert to
become a regular poster. (Who out of us would really claim to be an
expert anyway?) Indeed, I'd say the way to getting closer to becoming
an expert is precisely by finding the answers to questions when you're
still a newbie :)
People have had a lot of time to find out the problems with C++ or VB
not matter how infrequently that problem may occur or how isoteric the
area of programming it is in there has not been so much time with C#
that means the chance of hitting a problem no one else has encountered
is higher and that sort of problem is harder for people to answer
Click to expand...

True - although more interesting :)
I'd expect the number of regular responders to increase gradually as
language use goes up
Click to expand...

Possibly - although it's fairly similar in the Java newsgroups.
 
Well, I wouldn't discourage people asking questions even if they had the
answer on the next page in the book in front of them. A steady flow of
questions, even simple ones proves there is activity in the group.
 
Morten Wennevik said:
Well, I wouldn't discourage people asking questions even if they had the
answer on the next page in the book in front of them. A steady flow of
questions, even simple ones proves there is activity in the group.
Click to expand...

I don't think we need simple questions to prove that there's activity
in the group though - there's plenty of activity. I would discourage
people from asking questions they can easily find the answers to so
that those responding are more likely to spend their time on questions
which the poster genuinely *can't* find the answer to otherwise.
 
I agree completely with your comments, Jon. I don't answer nearly as many
posts as you do, but I find that act of answering questions often provides a
more rich learning experience for me than just reading the topic on my own.
Also, I find that answering questions injects a lot of diversity into the
learning process. There are some topics that I would probably have never
researched had I not been answering a question. And, there have been many
times where that research paid off later by allowing me to offer options to
a solution that we might not have known existed.
 
Thanks to everyone for their responses.

I would like to have enough time to answer all the questions I could.
Unfortunately, I just don't have the time.

Like Jon Skeet said in one of his posts, I agree that those of us that like
to research/code during our free time learn from the threads posted. I wish
I convince the young programmers under me too to the same or instill a
passion for programming but I know it's up to them.

Either you LOVE it or you just do it. Think about everyone. We get paid to
solve problems, what could be better than that. :)

Thanks again for everyone!!!!
 
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