what to do

[jhermiz]

What do you do when you keep posting stuff in the forums and you just dont get any answer .

I've gotten to the point were I can barely post anymore just because I am doing a lot more advanced stuff than some of the people on the forum. I mean do you keep bumping?? It might be me but I just dont see people who or at least I rarely see people
who understand or post to questions that involve intense work or advanced functionality. It almost seems to me that the majority of the programmers on the forum are just programmers for fun or younger adolescents.

So what happens to us who actually do this for a living and continue to ask a question but dont get any answers. Do you PM the living crap out of people. Do you keep bumping. Do you leave vbf entirely and find a new forum ?

[MartinLiss]

No, you don't bump your threads. I know that that is hard to accept but imagine what would happen if everyone was competing to be on top of the first page. Post the URL of one of your unanswered questions and I'll see if I can suggest anything.

[RobDog888]

Hey Jon, I know what you mean. I think that the majority of members
are at the beginner or intermediate levels. Yes, I hardly see
threads by us advanced members. I dont nearly start as many
threads as I used to, maybe only a couple a week now. The
advanced members spend most of their time helping the n00bs or
becoming Mods.

Do we need an area for "Advanced" topics or questions? I dont
know, something to help out us more advanced members. Maybe
we could have a concentrated effort by all the gurus to help each
other out.

What do you guys think?

Edit: One more post Martin, and its 12k for you!

[MartinLiss]

Speaking for myself, I try to help whereever I can, advanced or not and I think that that is true of most people. I don't know what you mean by "...spend most of their time...becoming Mods."

[RobDog888]

I mean that the serious members become Mods and then part of
their time is taken away from regular posting. I am only
wondering how to solve Jons question about not getting
responses on his advanced topics. When we have hard questions
there are only a handful of members that can actually understand
what the problem is, let alone how to solve it.

And yes, I too spend practically every waking moment on this site
helping members solve their issues.

[mendhak]

Yeah, we all reach that stage eventually. That's when your thread is the only one in the forum with 0 replies, and 2 views (both views being yours). You can bump once or twice, but it's of no use.

What I usually do when I'm stuck on something:

I try to bring it down to the specifics. The very core of the problem so that I can ask that tiny little specific question. It has a better chance of being answered, rather than me posting the entire saga which would be so long that nobody would bother going past line 2.

Of course... it also helps if you have good searching skills and if your company is a Microsoft partner, but that's not really the point

[dglienna]

maybe an Expert Help Needed, except that everyone would use it. Maybe the mods could make a few stickies for a few days? I'm sure everyone answers the questions that they feel comfortable answering, but some seem to not have activity for a few days. I usually only look at recent posts, and have gone down a few pages to find recent answers for follow-up.
Maybe we could click on the replies column to have them sorted? That way, all the un-answered ones would be at the top?
Instead of being sorted by date all of the time

[Electroman]

Posted by mendhak
I try to bring it down to the specifics. The very core of the problem so that I can ask that tiny little specific question. It has a better chance of being answered, rather than me posting the entire saga which would be so long that nobody would bother going past line 2.

I've noticed this before, sent a fair amount of PMs for it too, on simple questions people can over complicate things by giving to much info which puts people off reading/answering.

Of course some questions will still be hard to answer even when you've done this but for that I've used more specialised forums which focus on the problem. For example I had a Physics Modelling Problem for a game of mine and I tried posting it here with no luck, I'd simpilified it to just asking about the bare maths for it but it didn't help. I then used google and found a Adv. Maths/Physics Forum which I then posted the Q at. There I got some replies, even though they were very confussed to why I would want to do it that way I got answers. I gotta say though even though I use the odd other forum when I get stuck I've never come across such a community as this one .

[mendhak]

Oh, getting back to the original topic (?), I don't think an "Expert's forum" would be of any use. Everyone's working on something different, specializing in a sort of way. That makes it a little difficult to provide good solid answers. Instead, only suggestions come out of it, which is the same thing as posting in the regular forums. Know what I mean?

[jhermiz]

Originally posted by mendhak
Oh, getting back to the original topic (?), I don't think an "Expert's forum" would be of any use. Everyone's working on something different, specializing in a sort of way. That makes it a little difficult to provide good solid answers. Instead, only suggestions come out of it, which is the same thing as posting in the regular forums. Know what I mean?

That makes sense...I just think Rob made a good point that sometimes people dont even understand the complexity I am looking to acheive. I can sit here and say well I cant pull of a record or my button isnt becoming invisible and all of a sudden I have 3000 views and 30 replies.

But I start talking about integration, activex user defined controls, advanced classes and people don't even bother to look or when they answer its always "what the hell are you doing that for". There is a reason why Im trying to acheive for some advanced functionality. I work in a pretty big corporation and simple applications are the past.

So I guess really there is no true answer, maybe marty's right just deal with it for now...and maybe more searching.

Thanks,
Jon

[RobDog888]

How about asking Brad on your issue. If he cant solve it he probably
could point you in the right direction, or where to find helpful
resources? He should know some gurus over there at his other sites.

[BuggyProgrammer]

I go to experts exchange. Those people really can help you with advance topics. I have an account there racking up free points to ask questions.

[dis1411]

an 'Experts' section may be hard to achieve

at first it would definitely be flooded by everyone, and people would have to stick to their guns and say this is too simple to be asked here

[RobDog888]

True, but there could be requirements for posting there. Like members
that have reached a certain level of posts, or else you cant see
the forum? I dont know? Maybe it should be ultimately up to the
Mods to search for "UnResolved" threads and try to solve them?

Just trying to see it there is anything we can figure out.

[Merri]

Well, most often when I get into advanced stuff and know somebody can't answer the question, I'll go ahead and try to figure it out myself. If that doesn't work, I go for an alternative solution. Being blessed with creative mind, I can always come up a some way to make out what I want. In the other hand, I try to avoid utter complexity: solid, simplish, understandable solution is a nice way to go. You can't always do it, but the more you do it, the more skilled you get on it and the easier it is to find out an "easy" solution to do anything.

I think asking "why" is only natural way to react something that sounds complex. Why do complex if there might be an easy way that is about just as effective?


As mendhak, I'm against experts forum as well. It just wouldn't work - idea can be wonderful, but to make everyone understand the idea... that's a bit different issue. "General VB Questions" - the whole thing says what you can do there: ask VB related questions. "Expert VB Questions" - I just can't say anything short on that. It would take a lot of words to describe what I think on it. That's not good. A forum's idea must be simple so everyone can easily understand what it is about. What even more, different people think expert level differently. Expert, advanced, complex... it depends on the person what s/he thinks what it is.

Uh, I guess you got the picture of what I mean by that. Anyways... a solution? Nah, I don't have a real one. Only what I talked about in the beginning of this post: make yourself advanced enough to be able to do it all on your own.

[RobDog888]

Maybe it should be ultimately up to the Mods to search for "UnResolved"
threads and try to solve them?

I think as I stated earlier that this is probably the only solution.
Unless we are like you - without any questions that we can not
figure out ourselves?

No offense but if your on the Forums then you must have had a
question or two that you could not figure out by yourself?

[dis1411]

maybe there could be a new usergroup.. call it Problem Solvers or somthing, and they would help by looking for unresolved threads

[Merri]

Originally posted by RobDog888
No offense but if your on the Forums then you must have had a
question or two that you could not figure out by yourself?

I'm not sure if you pointed that to me as well, but most often my questions are related to lack of knowledge: I need to know about some function call (API) and maybe some additional information on it. Often it is also possible for myself to just look it up from somewhere, it would require more work from my part, but it would be possible not to ask any question to anyone else. Web is a big source of knowledge - asking something on a forum just makes it easier to find out the knowledge. If you want the knowledge bad enough, you can find it out by yourself even if nobody helps you out.

[RhinoBull]

Originally posted by Merri
Well, most often when I get into advanced stuff and know somebody can't answer the question, I'll go ahead and try to figure it out myself. If that doesn't work, I go for an alternative solution. Being blessed with creative mind, I can always come up a some way to make out what I want. In the other hand, I try to avoid utter complexity: solid, simplish, understandable solution is a nice way to go. You can't always do it, but the more you do it, the more skilled you get on it and the easier it is to find out an "easy" solution to do anything.

I think asking "why" is only natural way to react something that sounds complex. Why do complex if there might be an easy way that is about just as effective? ...

I couldn't agree more ...
Programming is art plus science and I am not sure which one comes first. If someone is not creative enough then programming may become a very boring and abusive routine.
Simplicity is what I personally think is the most dificult part for majority programmers to achive. Many begin to experiment with Windows API when there is plenty of built-in functionalities, also many try to implement OOP in very havy flavor when all they need is say simple array of integers or perhaps a UDT.

... and after all what is advanced level - something that you didn't know yesterday and familiar with that today ? If that's the case then it's not advanced anymore (at elast not for you). Grouping Option buttons is an advance stuff for many ...

Best of luck to all and Cheers.

[jhermiz]

[szlamany]

I've just spent two days helping someone who keeps wanting to use "&" to concatenate SQL field elements in a QUERY line. I keep posting back what the correct line of code to use is and I'm like banging my head against the wall...

If I knew the "experience" level of the person - would I still want to help? The answer is yes - I've got to deal with the frustration somehow - that's why I'm venting here. I'm a teacher at heart - I love to help people understand a problem and come up with a solution.

Experience is too hard a thing to measure - I've been in programming for over 25 years - almost all of it on mainframes - only 3 years in VB and MS SQL. Those past three years have been all about bringing my new "skill set" up to the level it was at on the mainframe.

But back to the original question - maybe members could elect to become part of a group that is "auto-notified" of other posts by members in that group.

Oh, by the way, they just posted back that it finally worked - over a dozen posts about a stupid & vs + character...

Arrgghh....

[dglienna]

some people need you to hold their hand while you walk them through the steps. Eventually the light bulb lights up, and they get that. Thats why the forums are good. If you stick around long enough and ask enough questions, you usually get the desired result that you wanted.
It doesn't matter what your experience level is, if you don't get something, you just don't get it.
Maybe the answer is to PM a mod if there is no response, who could forward it to someone that they know can help, if they can't do it themselves?

[RobDog888]

Originally posted by dglienna
Maybe the answer is to PM a mod if there is no response, who
could forward it to someone that they know can help, if they can't
do it themselves?

That is what I was trying to get at with my Forum suggestion, just
some way to get advanced questions answered. Although,
anyone can pm Brad as it is now.