The essence of being

Ok wierd title i know but let me explain,
A forum is as the name suggests a place where people can come and discuss topics, the essence to that is gettign feedback, ideas suggestions and god willing a little argument and constructive advise..

Now not to sound a little critical but i have been a member of vb forums for at least 3- 4 years now i think, and i have noticed that there has been over the past 12 months a rapid decline in use and i personally attribute that to the moderators and some of the more advanced programmers amongst us.
What seems to be happening on nearly every thread is "Run a search for it", "search the forums" or "check the link in my signature its got a great tutorial". If people wanted to read a tutorial on the subject they would do, but they have come to a discussion forum because thats obviously how they want to learn the subject matter.

Now i remember not so long back the way it used to work was - someone would ask a question and they would get a reply similar to "i am working on something similar have you tried putting that into a class, i did and it worked great".. with someone else chipping in with "yeah and if you do this instead of that it may improve the preformace"..

It used to be healthy!! the junior members used to learn by instructing and discussiing with others of a similar level but as said above this doesnt happen anymore because higher members are jumping stright in with the first reply which just says "run a search on the forums" which kills off the discussion.

Now dont get me wrong the back posts are an amazing knowledge base of information that the whole forum has built up together, lets just try to get back to filling the knowledge base rather than refering to it!!.


Rob

I don't think you're entirely correct - not all people always search the forum or search for a tutorial before asking a question.

A forum is also about giving initiative, and a statement like "search for this topic in the forum" gives it to them, instead of being a robot and answering it.

Its a per case basis, when a problem that is presented has been dealt with before already then naturally one could just search for it instead of other members to 're-invent the wheel' again.

Which is exactly the point, inovation does not come from immitation, reinventing the wheel sometimes gives amazing results.. and the exact point of the post is to say that most people do not want to simply read through other peoples threads. they like active participation... Think of it like this, a trainner goes into a business premisis to teach 10 people a new task, he has been teaching people this task for years, does he simply throw them a book at the start and when they ask a question he simply says "the answer to that is on page 60", no!, because its not an effective learning method, although he has answered the same question hundreds of times before - the person asking the question will be more switched on to an answer.

another example, just the other day in the games programming forum, i went clicked on, saw a question on a subject that i am actually working on right now and jumped on the question hoping a discussion was goign on that i could get involved in, but nope there was two replys to the post, one saying "run a google search" and the other saying "do a search on the forum", if all we are ever going to do is reference previous topics we may as well all copy and paste the MSDN online libary link and just send them there!!!

I think maybe the google searches are for the lazy but search the forums is a good answer because if its been asked and answered a bunch of times its a time saver to point them to the answer (which is faster response for them) then to take some time and duplicate what you have wrote. If we all took hours to rewite code we wouldnt have such great response times with actual answers.

To be honest, it kinda sounds like you are expecting members to always provide you with code answers when that is not a reality. Members all volunteer their time and most like to help teach coding. The saysing goes, give a man a fish and feed him for the day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for life. ;)

When the site was still starting out we had alot of easy questions like msgbox etc. As time went on the questions became more advanced. Not everyone has hours to devote to doing volunteer work. So in such cases perhaps a search the forums is appropriate when they know the answer in on our site. Programming take alot of investment of time, persistance, reading and patience. If one doesnt have those then how can they succeed.

A quick response as I skim by the forum.... :)


The visits and page views are up and have not gone down on this forum in a very long time. Having said that, you made me curious, so I looked at overall posts. Those are actually down the last two months a little bit, but December had an extra long holiday schedule that impacted it to some extent. Regardless, participation is high, posts are high, but not as high as previous months.

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Originally Posted by makster246

and the exact point of the post is to say that most people do not want to simply read through other peoples threads. they like active participation...

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I actually agree with your post. I often don't like reading the "go search Google" responses and such. Even the 'go search this forum' suggestions sometimes are not things I find great. Of course, if it is a person with one or two posts, then the "go search this forum" or "click this link that is a search results for this forum" I don't mind as much, because it is more likely the person is a 'drive by poster' and is looking for an easy answer. Even still, I absolutely agree that they would feel more welcomed and more likely to stick around if they got a personalized answer.

I also agree that discussing some topics multiple times is not so bad because it does or can result in new insights. Of course, discussion "how do a create a class to track the students in a class" or other homework assignments does get old, but even so, I agree that "do a search" isn't likely to help convert someone to the next power poster on this forum.

You've raised some comments. It would be interesting to hear if others agree.

(I do believe we have some people that are posting more "do a search" answers; however, I think some of them do this because they don't have the answers themselves.... Others do it because sometimes it does seem that the poster is simply looking for a 'hand out' and not really looking for a discussion.

Brad!

I agree with Mendhak, many people, espescially the fly by night posters, don't perform a search before asking their questions, so pointing them to an article in somone's signature or an old post is a perfectly acceptable response.

These forums are a two way street and I think the people answering questions expect a certain level of effort from the people asking the questions. I know nothing irks me more than when I provide a design for someone and even a little bit of sample code and the person just copies and pastes without reading the whole post and then complains that it doesn't do exactly what they want it to do.

If I can see someone putting forth the effort and trying to learn, then I am always more than happy to help them reach their final solution (if I can :)).

At makster246,

I can see where you are coming from and kind of agree it would be better if people used the search function. However, since a lot of people do not always know what the name want it is pointless. There are also a number of ways different posters could use to describe the same problem or solution.

On a less serious note who posters like Mendhak or RobDog888 have such huge post counts if everyone used the forum search function! :D

NO! Eveeryone dont use the search feature I want to answer and write the same code over and over again :D

I think Negative 0's post about if the poster is not doing any effort and doesnt want to learn, basically "gimme code" will not reap in depth long and detailer replies with code examples etc. Now if they are showing effort then I know many will gladly provide that "extra" level of effort because of it.

Bottom line though, its all relative and subjective, no blanket statement can cover it.

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Originally Posted by RobDog888

Bottom line though, its all relative and subjective, no blanket statement can cover it.

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Absolutely!

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Originally Posted by brad jones

Absolutely!

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You forgot 'Brad!' :eek: ;)

I dont see a problem refering to threads within the forum, personally I usually refer people to my TCP example in my signature because it is a veeery common topic and creating a new example for each and everyone would be painful. What I am a little more opposed to is referring to google. Altough I bet it has happened that even I have referred someone to google once or twice ( :blush: ), it just feels like it works against the purpose of a forum.

As someone who's relatively new I find the lack of useful replies to a lot of the topics I'm skimming a bit off putting. I don't really feel that I can ask a question so I'm actually put off making a topic or post.

Whilst I agree that if it's something ridiculously stupid it's best just to tell people to search... I think a lot of new members would like something more welcoming.

Even if you just do a quick search and paste one or two links in and then say 'search the forum for more'

It opens dialogue and makes people feel welcome. I'm quite certain that if this community appeared more friendly (I'm sure everyone is friendly, but from an outsiders view it appears as though asking a question is regarded as bad by the senior members and that you're unlikely to even get an attempt to help you) I'd have made more than two posts.

I can understand that, and am careful not to give a simple "do a search" kind of answer - I typically only do it once every few months (and then only to people who have been here for a while, and still aren't finding things they should).

There are many well written examples around (such as in the CodeBank forums), so if apt I will just link to them, or explain what/where to search - good examples include Encryption and "MultiThreading in VB6", which take a large amount of effort to write properly, and have already been done thoroughly. While I could spend a couple of hours working on either of those, I am unlikely to come up with something new, so linking to an existing example (and answering any questions about usage etc) is probably the best way to help (in terms of my time, and giving the poster a 'complete' answer sooner).

There are also lots of fairly simple questions which get asked very regularly, and understandably people do get bored/annoyed at re-writing the same responses every time - in which case I try to create an FAQ article for it (given enough spare time to research & write it properly!), so then we can direct people to that and the apt FAQ index, eg:

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For an explanation of why you should be using parameters (and links to code examples), see the article Why should I use Parameters instead of putting values into my SQL string? from our Database Development FAQs/Tutorials (at the top of the Database Development forum).

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FAQ articles are by no means designed to answer every question, but to explain the common things as well as possible - so we can easily give people a thorough answer to the "boring" part, and then put our efforts into explaining the extra parts that are needed in their particular case.


Hopefully this gives a good mix of getting peoples questions answered well, and not getting anyone annoyed!

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Originally Posted by brad jones

You've raised some comments. It would be interesting to hear if others agree.

(I do believe we have some people that are posting more "do a search" answers; however, I think some of them do this because they don't have the answers themselves.... Others do it because sometimes it does seem that the poster is simply looking for a 'hand out' and not really looking for a discussion.

Brad!

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Do a search of this forum, and I'm sure you'll find lots of answers....:wave:


In general, I don't really like that reply, though there are a few cases where I would use it. VB.NET vs VB6 is the one topic that comes readily to mind, as I have seen several long threads on that particular topic, and have contributed to some of them often enough that I don't really want to beat that horse any more.

Other questions, such as transfering data between forms and UDP questions, I refer people to individual threads, because in both cases I started a thread that contains about all I have to say on the subject (initially). I've also found, in the case of UDP, that even giving somebody the search criteria (started by me, the word UDP, and a length of greater than 7 posts, which is how I find the thing whenever I want to post the link) is not sufficient. If people can't find something that exists, even when they are given the criteria, then saying "search the forum" is often of no value at all, though I know not why.

The problem, as I see it, is that for some of us who lurk around here a fair amount, we see threads on certain subjects at least weekly, and are so used to them that we don't really want to reiterate what we posted a few days ago. Not always, but it happens.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

The problem, as I see it, is that for some of us who lurk around here a fair amount, we see threads on certain subjects at least weekly, and are so used to them that we don't really want to reiterate what we posted a few days ago. Not always, but it happens.

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Check out this thread and you should find what you need to know:'
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...35#post3421735

That reads much better than "do a search". Yeah, they should be able to, but since they indicated they couldn't by their very post, sometimes it is nice to give them a push.... ;) :)

Brad!

Help!!! I'm trapped in a recursive link!

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

Help!!! I'm trapped in a recursive link!

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Some people have to be told something more than once before they "get it."

;) :D

I agree with the OP with one cravat. I dont mind when a question is asked and the poster is given a link to another post because if it is not 100% what they need they can always state that. I do wish VBF had some form of article system that way the most common questions could be answered with a well structured article rather than a half baked post (no matter how well meant). To prove this works I would always rather search codeprojects articles base before asking a question here.

We do have many articles in the FAQ forum, but so far fairly few for .Net - mainly for usage of Databases and Office programs, in the apt FAQ indexes.

For other things there are examples in the CodeBank, but of course the topics aren't quite as easy to learn from as FAQ articles.

Of course, and im not disrespecting them, some of the articles are very in debt but I still think an actual article engine would be better!

I don't think people read those any more than they search. Half of all the "search this..." posts I see are references to the FAQ page.

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

Of course, and im not disrespecting them, some of the articles are very in debt but I still think an actual article engine would be better!

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We have an entire section on Visual Basic on Codeguru and we have a Zone on DevX aimed at VB (both owned by the company that ones this forum). Because if this, it is hard for me to talk the powers that approve to do a separate VB Articles site. There originally was such a beast assocaited with this forum and it was rolled into Developer.com (another of our sites).

I could create look into branding more of Codeguru's VB section with VBForums, but it would still be Codeguru and require a Codeguru login.

Let me ponder this some more. Feel free to keep commenting...

(I'm thinking via a forum post, which is never good.... :sick: )

Brad!

True, I think a restyle of VBF is still needed though, more features means more pages which mean more adverts. For instance you could have adverts the size of the top one down the whole side of the article section and still have plenty of reading room (sorry brad, im a sales exec by trade, sand to the Arab's and all that :))

Actually come to think of it, if you added a home page (news) and a download page (approved content) you could squeeze in many more adverts, forums generally have limited space for adverts by nature.

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Originally Posted by DeanMc

True, I think a restyle of VBF is still needed though, more features means more pages which mean more adverts. For instance you could have adverts the size of the top one down the whole side of the article section and still have plenty of reading room (sorry brad, im a sales exec by trade, sand to the Arab's and all that :))

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Trust me, we can get more ads onto our existing pages. Take a look at nearly any other forum that we run (such as www.Codeguru.com/forum). You'll see we can place ads and other information on the right side and more. Some of our forums use vbAdvanced and have more ads on the front, landing page.

I know that isn't what you were trying to say, so let me also add...

Adding new features doesn't always mean more page views. Sometimes simpler, easier to use sites are better and more popular than those that have lots of features and thus begin to get complicated.

There need to be balance.

:)

Brad!

Its a tough one, and I can imagine its certainly being off putting for those new joiners who get told to 'do a search', when they where hoping for an answer in their original post, as well as some additional posts going back and forth over the answer.

Maybe some sort of one off personal email sent to all members who’ve been here 1+ years, (and are still active) to ask them to try and avoid the ‘do a search’ answers?

>>>Adding new features doesn't always mean more page views. Sometimes simpler, easier to use sites are better and more popular than those that have lots of features and thus begin to get complicated.
I can attest to that... the amount of the ads and the cramped feel ov CG is what keeps me over here instead.

>>>Maybe some sort of one off personal email sent to all members who’ve been here 1+ years, (and are still active) to ask them to try and avoid the ‘do a search’ answers?
then count me out. We're volunteers here. I didn't sign up to some one else's coding. Nor do I have the time to do other people's coding.... I have a list of common problems and a link to the appropriate threads in the forums. I'm not going to regurgitate what has already been hashed to death here for the sake of the poster's ego. I'm here because I want to help. Part of that helping is showing how to find the answers. Give a coder a line of code, he'll code for 5 minutes. Give a coder the means to look up the information and he'll code all day long.

-tg

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Originally Posted by techgnome

>>>Adding new features doesn't always mean more page views. Sometimes simpler, easier to use sites are better and more popular than those that have lots of features and thus begin to get complicated.
I can attest to that... the amount of the ads and the cramped feel ov CG is what keeps me over here instead.

>>>Maybe some sort of one off personal email sent to all members who’ve been here 1+ years, (and are still active) to ask them to try and avoid the ‘do a search’ answers?
then count me out. We're volunteers here. I didn't sign up to some one else's coding. Nor do I have the time to do other people's coding.... I have a list of common problems and a link to the appropriate threads in the forums. I'm not going to regurgitate what has already been hashed to death here for the sake of the poster's ego. I'm here because I want to help. Part of that helping is showing how to find the answers. Give a coder a line of code, he'll code for 5 minutes. Give a coder the means to look up the information and he'll code all day long.

-tg

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Agreed and also if they want complete code for every aspect of their program then they should either hire a professional programmer to complete the task or something. I make good money doing consulting on the side (as well as others on this site do) so why should I write someones program for them for free? Now if they want to learn then I'm here to help as long as they are willing to put some effort into it as well. This is what I enjoy about the site - teaching and spreading the knowledge. Otherwise if they are just looking for code, dont want to write any themselves and dont want to learn then I can be hired for $100-$150 per hour depending upon the project/task with an 8 hour minimum.

I agree with the CG statment the website layout is a nightmare, on adding new features. If you always do what you always do you will always get what youve always got!

Forgot to mention that we have suggested a portal page for VBF but I think before we ad any new features that the site speed issue be improved as its always slow in the mornings when the load is high.

Even a portal would be good!

Wouldn't do much good for me... I have two links into VBF, one goes straight into my userPanel so I can see my subscribed threads, and a second that goes straight into the New Posts search result.... Unless I'm forced to, I'd never see the portal page... Now... I'd like to ask, what would the point of the portal page be for anyways? Is it jsut going to end up being one more page that people don't read, skipping it on their way to the forums, or would it have something of value? If it's going to have more ads, or even simply run the VBWire, it's just going to be blindly skipped over by people on the way to the forums. Personally, I believe the less barriers there are for people, even the drive by posters, the more likely you are going to have a vibrant, active community.

-tg

A portal could have modules of info like... 10 recent threads, posts, news, new faqs/articles, user cp, stats etc

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Originally Posted by makster246

Ok wierd title i know but let me explain,
A forum is as the name suggests a place where people can come and discuss topics, the essence to that is gettign feedback, ideas suggestions and god willing a little argument and constructive advise..

Now not to sound a little critical but i have been a member of vb forums for at least 3- 4 years now i think, and i have noticed that there has been over the past 12 months a rapid decline in use and i personally attribute that to the moderators and some of the more advanced programmers amongst us.
What seems to be happening on nearly every thread is "Run a search for it", "search the forums" or "check the link in my signature its got a great tutorial". If people wanted to read a tutorial on the subject they would do, but they have come to a discussion forum because thats obviously how they want to learn the subject matter.

Now i remember not so long back the way it used to work was - someone would ask a question and they would get a reply similar to "i am working on something similar have you tried putting that into a class, i did and it worked great".. with someone else chipping in with "yeah and if you do this instead of that it may improve the preformace"..

It used to be healthy!! the junior members used to learn by instructing and discussiing with others of a similar level but as said above this doesnt happen anymore because higher members are jumping stright in with the first reply which just says "run a search on the forums" which kills off the discussion.

Now dont get me wrong the back posts are an amazing knowledge base of information that the whole forum has built up together, lets just try to get back to filling the knowledge base rather than refering to it!!.


Rob

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I both agree and disagree. The average poster on the forum posts for a quick solution to a problem they have been stuck on a few days. They probably won't come back but they might return if they receive a positive response. In all honesty, who joins a forum and posts a question to be told to go and search the forum or Google? Similarly, who wants to read a long post or thread that explains the solution to a similar problem but not their own?

That doesn't mean I disagree with such responses. If it is obvious that the person I am trying to help is in way over their head then I often point them to an online tutorial / manual. Helping such individuals by giving them code they can copy and paste is counter productive as it sends ill equipped programmers into the ether; the consequence of which is buggy and insecure applications.

Then there are questions which are often asked and don't have simple answers (e.g. multi threading, networking, distributed process). I tend to point the poster to another similar thread and quote any relevant info or code that they may find helpful. For those more complex questions, I like to see that the OP has gone away and read the examples, tried to adapt the code to their needs and post back with an intuitive response. Not; "I put that code in my app and it don't work. Pls help".

The very simple questions which are often asked; "e.g. how do I print the contents of an array", I won't give code, nor will I point to the code; I give an explanation of how the problem can be attacked and links to a couple of functions which will help them. Again, I tend to look for those who go away and try and apply the methodology and post back with a piece of code they have come up with.

The problem with any community is that there are many misaligned objectives. My personal opinion is that the more advanced programmers who post here have a responsibility to the programming community as a whole. Their main objective should be to spread good and secure programming practices to their less advanced peers and encourage wherever possible those seeking help to adopt an objective and investigative approach to finding a solution.

I usually give very thorough answers (to the best of my 'expertise' anyway) and almost always provide code examples but I think it is very unreasonable to expect people to never say "search the forums" etc as lets face it we are not going to go and re-write some code that we know already exists in another post (unless its a couple of lines long) so all we will do is search the forums and post the code from our findings... so why should we be doing that legwork instead of the person who wants to know the answer?
The other thing I dont like about the idea of just giving a full example/answer to every single post, no matter how easy/trivial, is that then people will just rely on asking questions on here to pretty much build most of their application. I see some new users come on here and ask several questions every day and whilst you could argue thats good that they want to learn etc, I think its quite obvious a lot of the time that they are not really learning much and are just copying/pasting bits and only learning the bare minimum.

I just think that if its something that is covered in 90% of the "learning Vb.NET" tutorials on the web then why shouldn't we just direct them to the search function or google instead of typing out the same old thing every day and no one learning how to find things out for themselves.

Like techgnome said, we are all volunteers here and we could all find other things we wanted to do, so I think people getting offended/annoyed when someone doesnt want to do all their research for them is very unreasonable.

I don't believe I said we should post the code/answers to every post.... If I did, that was a bad post on my part. I'd rather see us link to existing code than post the same code again. I do agree with not posting "do a search" by itself. That post is prety much worthless as the person likely did a search to get to VBForums.....

I might be repeating myself, but
What I consider best is trying to provide a little help such as posting a response like "I believe that has been answered in the thread at http://www.vbforums.com. If that doesn't help, do a forum search and see if that shows something closer. If not, let us know what is different from the referenced thread."

You can see that this statement actually provides a little bit of help by giving a link, yet also works to train the person to do a search. By giving some actual help (the link), we might actually get someone to become a part of the community. While this might be a basic question they are asking now, in a few years, they might be a power poster that is helping others (as many of our current members can relate). As you an see, no code was provided in this suggested approach ;) .

The value I see in a simple "Do a search" post is one of self interest to increase the one's post count with a minimal amount of effort ;) :)

Brad!

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"I believe that has been answered in the thread at [Insert VBF Solution Link Here]. If that doesn't help, do a forum search and see if that shows something closer. If not, let us know what is different from the referenced thread."

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I think this "could" be a template for future posts :D

hi guys, sorry i started the post and stepped back, i was actually away for the month on business.

Its been really good to see the mixed responses. I really like the sound of robdogs suggestion