First off, that was a damn good answer to the original question. I think that everyone else (including me) was assuming that he wanted to hijack someone else's experience but it
may have been that he just wanted an idea of how to approach such an open ended question. It's not clear which is the right or wrong interpretation but both are worth considering. However in fact that's one reason why...
Christopher Kernahan wrote:Last night I saw an impressive talk by Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Exchange. One of the points he made is that Stack Exchange is set up not only to attract the right kind of people, but also to repel the wrong kind of people. For example, in the Maths forum, if you ask a question that can be answered by the average Maths professor, it is not a hard enough question, and is closed. Similarly, if your question is off topic, too local (i.e please debug my code), or has been asked before, it is closed. Worth considering, I think.
... that isn't likely to happen. (And for clarity, here I'm speaking for me, not on behalf of the other Admins.)
I didn't see the interview in question but if he's being quoted correctly my estimation of Stack Exchange just went down. Not hugely, but just a bit. It comes down to this; what are their intentions? Is it to be a forum for all people, to promote learning and understanding of their chosen subjects orrrrr... is it intended to be nothing more than a mutual back slapping society for the most talented, dealing only in the most obscure and esoteric issues?
This place is named TM1Forum, not TM1ExpertsOnlyForum and my own preference is that we lean toward the former demographic. There's the old saying that "there's no such thing as a stupid question", though a lot of us have been around this place long enough to know that isn't so... but there's a huge difference between a
stupid question and an
inexperienced question. Things that may be obvious to those of us who have used the tool for ages may not be so to someone who has only just started out in it. Alternatively the nature of a question may
seem obvious... and yet someone else may see another possible side to it, much as you've done here. It would seem to me unfortunate if someone, even me, were to arbitrarily start locking off threads on the basis that they seem too easy or too obvious or just plain wrong in some way.
Encountering a complete newbie question doesn't bother me. The questions that
do tend to grind (not only with me I've noticed) are:
- Ones where the poster clearly hasn't bothered to read the Guidelines or even skim the FAQ, since both are sitting right up there at the head of the forum. This is grossly disrespectful because it assumes that the asker's time is more important than the answerer's time, though this is the backwash of the current belief that no-one should ever try to figure anything out for themselves since they can just jump on the web and ask. The one time that I did ask a question on Stack Exchange I made daaaammn sure that I explained all the references that I'd checked, and the past answers I found which were vaguely similar but which didn't apply to my case. The question was rated up by a few people in no small part I think because of that and I'm sure that questions which do the same here (especially since it
is part of the Guidelines..) are received more favourably and tolerantly. I can understand if they don't even know where to start in the documentation, such is the arbitrariness of some of the divisions in it and such is the absurdity of retaining the 7 separate documents to be searched one at a time from the HTML help. (And Steve's poetic description of the field, haystack and needle is is the most apt metaphor for the IBM web site that I've ever heard.) But it's nice if they take the time to do
something to try to understand / figure out the issue before they post.
- Ones where the poster doesn't take the time to think the question through and ask it clearly. I can think of at least one person who pops up from time to time and who occasionally asks a question which omits a key piece of the puzzle because thinking out the question and explaining it in full detail would be far too time consuming. (See also: "My time is more important than yours".)
- Ones which are posted by people who are selling their services as "Professional" consultants but have no clue about the product, and who expect the very people whose livelihoods they're undercutting to supply the answers. Worse, the ones who pretend that that's not the case and that they're just end users. While I
generally think that the TM1 community is too small to try to divide it into the right and wrong sort of people... these are as close as I'd come to saying "yeah, wrong sort".
- Ones where someone will post a really bad idea, usually involving some Heath Robinson-ish method of doing a simple data movement, half a dozen people reply giving them a simple, straightforward way of doing it, and they still keep posting "Yes, but I still don't understand
how can I have a TM1 chore write a value to my Oracle database to run a trigger to send an e-mail to Outlook so that it can open Excel and run a macro to log on, open Server Explorer and type the number 2 into my cube?" Oh, and then 5 days later they open a new thread to ask exactly the same question.
However with the possible exception of the third group, the objective isn't really about discouraging people from
participating in the forum (and group 3 isn't actively discouraged though when people find out about their game answers may be thin on the ground)... though I'd agree that certain
behaviours should be discouraged. Not necessarily for relative newbies; pointing out to them that they may need to consult the FAQ/Guidelines may be done quite curtly at times (though personally I'm trying to avoid even doing that (not always successfully) to try to keep the overall tone positive) but when you have people who tend to be repeat offenders it's inevitable that some will get verbally snarled at occasionally. Not always pleasant to watch, but certainly better than arbitrarily censoring their threads, I think.
