* Why Ask Questions in Public?

[admin]

God put me on earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind I will never die. Bill Waterson, (Calvin and Hobbes)

I, like many other people with technical expertise in some topic, regularly read various forums and mailing lists and try to answer questions for which I know the answer. However, I am also extremely busy with a large number of projects, and I've found that taking some time to help other people sometimes has the regrettable tendency to add to my total level of pending work. This is sometimes hard for me to deal with, and I'd like to ask for your help in solving this problem.

The problem generally takes the following form: Someone posts a question about something I know something about. I respond in the forum or on the mailing list with some suggestions or possibly some questions. In response, the person mails me directly (rather than responding in the forum or mailing list) with the answers and with other questions. Occasionally the problem takes another, related form: I post about a topic, someone who has a question about that topic reads my posts and thinks I sound knowledgable, and they send me e-mail asking me questions.

I understand why people do this. Often they view forums and mailing lists as giant, impersonal places and want to get out of them as soon as they can, and as soon as they find someone who can answer their questions, they latch on to that person and want to interact with them directly. I'm sure that they don't understand that this behavior causes problems for the person of whom they're asking questions.

Unfortunately, it does cause problems at least for me. I receive huge amounts of e-mail messages every day, including messages that are critical to my job and must be responded to quickly. It's already difficult for me to keep up with all of them, and these additional questions add to the load. Please remember that I'm not being paid to give technical support, and I may have only had a few moments inbetween other projects to post the public message you saw. Now, once you've sent me e-mail, I feel some obligation to answer it, it adds to the (often long) list of unanswered messages in my inbox that I feel guilty about, and in general it tends to add stress to my life.

Even worse, by mailing me directly rather than asking your question in public you have robbed yourself of many other valuable resources: all of the other readers of the forum or mailing list. I'm almost never the sole technical expert on whatever topic you need help with, but by mailing me directly you've put all of the onus of answering your question on me personally. You haven't given those of us who can answer your question the opportunity to share the load among us and provide better (and peer-reviewed!) answers.

By asking questions in private, you've also robbed those people who come after you with the same question of benefiting from the answer that you receive. forums are archived, and frequently mailing lists are as well. Many people search those archives for answers to their questions before they ask. The more questions and answers we can get into those archives, the more the general searchable base of knowledge grows for everyone else working in the same area.

So please, unless you have a question that only I can answer for some reason, ask it in public on a forum or mailing list. I'm more likely to be in a question-answering mood when I encounter your question, you're giving more people the chance to help you, you're helping all the people who come after you that have the same question, and you won't be contributing to the problem that many of us have in keeping up with our private e-mail. You're even likely to get a better answer, and could spark a discussion of your problem that would give far more information than you would have gotten out of any one individual.

Thank you for making it easier to help you with your problem.


Jane

based on an original document at
http://www.eyrie.org./~eagle/faqs/questions.html

[rimmer]

Very good point.

[Iant]

Part of the problem is that using Reply instead of Reply All, in Outlook Express, uses the originator's address to reply to rather than the group. This has come up before, and on other groups too I think. Personally I find this counter intuitive, as I expect all correspondence to be via the group by default. Fortunately it is only a problem for me on a minority of groups I subscribe to.
Ian Thirlwell

[PJK]

Perhaps you should always wait 24 or 48 hours before responding to any question on the Forum, Jane, then other people might answer it for and before you. (How often is a FH question really 'urgent' in the sense that it really is time-critical?)