[corey@12mile]

In my great quest for knowledge, specifically learning more about Eclipse, I ran into this interesting article... which is pretty good, even though I can't stand Eric Raymond...

http://catb.org/%7Eesr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Here's a direct quote from it, which could be a great "before you make your first post" or even before you make your first 10 posts...

Before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:

Try to find an answer by searching the Web.

Try to find an answer by reading the manual.

Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.

Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.

Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.

If you are a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code.

When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these things first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and wasting people's time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated that they can learn from the answers.

This would be a great 'confirmation' message before a user with less than 10 posts actually posts.

cd.

[corey@12mile]

And I second that there post above! Especially the lazy sponge part.

cd.

[PhilMax]

Originally Posted by corey@12mile

.......lazy sponge

cd.

Wait just a minute. I resemble that remark!

[spraven]

Man...I have been involved in many forums in the past (and still am) and the whole purpose of them, at least I thought so, was to help each other. I have never been to a Forum that makes people feel so "small" just for asking a question.

I have used the search function to try to resolve several of my questions, some of which worked and gave useful information, and some of which was full of garbage...but I must say that I would think Twice (or more) before bothering anyone on here who is so much better than the rest of us who happen to need a little help.

I am sure you all feel differently and I don't really care...I just wanted that to be made known to you!

[bfrye]

That may be a little much Corey, but I agree partially.

Possibly for those users under 10 posts, have it state something such as..

Thank you for posting at BlackBerry Forums.

Before you complete your post, we want you to be aware that many FAQ's and HOWTO's exist for many of the simplest of questions. If you have browsed through these articles and are still unsure of your question, please feel free to ask. If you haven't however, please take the time to visit the links below or search for keywords for your query as your question may have already been answered. Thank you for taking the time to visit BlackBerry Forums

Link to Mark Rehjon's FAQ

Link to main search page

[bfrye]

Originally Posted by spraven

Man...I have been involved in many forums in the past (and still am) and the whole purpose of them, at least I thought so, was to help each other. I have never been to a Forum that makes people feel so "small" just for asking a question.

I have used the search function to try to resolve several of my questions, some of which worked and gave useful information, and some of which was full of garbage...but I must say that I would think Twice (or more) before bothering anyone on here who is so much better than the rest of us who happen to need a little help.

I am sure you all feel differently and I don't really care...I just wanted that to be made known to you!

Spraven, please understand we don't try to hold a "holier than thou" attitude around here. You also must understand how frustrating it can be when 5x a day we see the question "How do I remove the enterprise activation icon from my home screen?"

We try to answer every question possible, but keep in mind we also have the job of maintaining the forums, providing new and exciting features for you as a user, moving posts to their appropriate forums, plus keep along with our realtime jobs. I'm not complaining about any aspect of the work I do around here. I enjoy it. Otherwise I wouldn't have signed up for the job. But as mentioned above, it can be very frustrating answering questions that, most of the time, have been answered, more than one, on the same page.

[corey@12mile]

Originally Posted by spraven

Man...I have been involved in many forums in the past (and still am) and the whole purpose of them, at least I thought so, was to help each other. I have never been to a Forum that makes people feel so "small" just for asking a question.

I have used the search function to try to resolve several of my questions, some of which worked and gave useful information, and some of which was full of garbage...but I must say that I would think Twice (or more) before bothering anyone on here who is so much better than the rest of us who happen to need a little help.

I am sure you all feel differently and I don't really care...I just wanted that to be made known to you!

I can totally understand your point, but when people join here and their first post is "how do I unlock..." or "Do I need BES" etc. I swear every week there is someone asking about unlocking. Or people asking about "Data connection refused". There are questions like this posted all the time. The answers are all readily available.

Some people are just too lazy to try and look for the answer. If people don't have time to look for the answer, then they should pay RIM to answer their questions for them.

I don't think my suggestion is harsh at all, I think it is proactive. People should not be so lazy, and try and do some research first, if they don't understand something they should read more. I learned everything I know, for the most part by reading, reading and experimenting...

I don't mind helping people, if they show that they have put in some kind of effort to begin with. If someone says to me... Hey Corey... I am having such and such problem... I went to whatever.com and read this and that, I google'd it but couldn't find the answer, can you help me out? I will more then help the person out... There are several people I have helped out from start to finish, going out of my way several times, sometimes costing me money to help a complete stranger... why? because they showed that they put some effort into solving the problem on their own.

Is spending an hour of time to try and research a problem too much to ask before asking for "hand me out answers"? There are questions posted on here all the time that have been answered several times over... You can't tell me that these people still asking the question have done any searching whatsoever...

Recently there was someone asking questions on here because their boss was laying it on them to figure it out... If it's this important, get out you credit card and call RIM... the answers were readily available, and the person admitted that they hadn't searched at all... give me a friggin break... This is just plain lazy.

Enough of my rant. If people are to lazy to find answers to their questions themselves, they shouldn't have the handhelds. period.

cd.

[PhilMax]

Geez, if someone asks a really repetitive question I might be inclined to just ignore it; I certainly am not going to let it ruin my day. If nobody answers they will almost be forced to search anyway. If someone else wants to respond and be helpful for the umpteenth time, so what?

[bfrye]

Well the biggest problem Phil, and one I'm trying to work on by modifying the search engine, is that all these requests show up when you search for a topic, and by default in chronological order.

That's why I will usually say something to the effect of

"Play around under message options. If that doesn't lead you anywhere try searching for [color=red]sent items[b]"

Hopefully soon when we get these repedative questions, we can answer it quickly or point to the appropriate search page, then lock the thread. Then the search engine won't search through locked threads. That way we can bring down the number of unanswered posts when searching for a specific topic.

[Dawg]

Its like I have said before I hit new posts and there before me are the same old questions in a new thread and today is a prime example I logged on this AM and hit new post and low and behold there before me was three posts all named the same thing in different areas guy had 3 posts total. nine of the ten new threads were repeat questions that had been answered many many many many many times over.

[PhilMax]

The impact on the search engine is a legitimate issue and something I certainly had not even considered. I just think people shouldn't take it as a "personal" affront because someone didn't search. Yours is the first "logical" response to the issue that I've seen, as opposed to the emotional responses that this topic seems to engender.

[spraven]

I agree that it can become tedious with the repetative questions and I like the suggestion of having a "splash screen" or something similar that requires the user to check a box stating that they have done the searches and "their homework" so to speak. I also agree that to some people, it is easier to just post the question instead of looking for the answer. I sincerely hope that I did not offend anyone by my earlier post, it just seemed that some of the replies that I have seen have been rather "pointed and almost personal" and to a "newbie" this is enough to turn them away for good.

As for the revamp of the search engine, that is probably a great idea just to cut down on some of the "clutter" you have to search through...although I certainly don't envy the process you have to go through to do so 'bfrye'

As a former moderator for a long gone "expert" board in the wireless industry, I can relate and empathize with you in your ongoing quest to offer relevant answers and streamline things. If only there were a way to do that in Real Life, everything would be just rosey... Having spent over 17 years in the everchanging wireless industry, I can certainly remember wanting to "throttle" many, many customers for not only asking the same question I have heard from so many others before, but (and perhaps the most annoying) the same question I have answered for them many times.

Ok, enough said...I do appreciate the caliber of answers available here. Our market is just about ready to launch the use of the Blackberry on CDMA (Alltel) so I am anxious to see just how many of those "lazy person" questions I get in person. I'm sure most of you can relate.

Cheers to all....

[corey@12mile]

Originally Posted by PhilMax

The impact on the search engine is a legitimate issue and something I certainly had not even considered. I just think people shouldn't take it as a "personal" affront because someone didn't search. Yours is the first "logical" response to the issue that I've seen, as opposed to the emotional responses that this topic seems to engender.

PhilMax... nothing here do I ever take personally, or emotionally... what does happen though, is that I start to wonder it's even worth it to try and help people... When I go through 50+ new posts of non-importance before I find 1 post where the person has a legitimate question it makes me not want to help them by that time...

This is why there was talk about having an advanced user forum... There aren't too many people who can truely be called blackberry experts around, but there are quite a few here... some of them are mods and bbf staff so to speak, so they have to walk a finer line, others on the other hand don't need to have the patience...

I may be considered and expert, I may not be, it really depends on who you ask, but I do want to help people. I want to help people who have tried and are stuck. I don't want to help people who are just plain lazy. In order to help people you have to read through almost all the posts, and the same questions over and over are quite monotonous... It's not as easy as just ignoring the posters of the same questions repeated over and over.

I wonder if it's possible to write a pre-verifier for posting that will scan for certain words and confirm whether it's a valid post, or a dupe of an existing post... when I say dupe, I mean look for phrases such as "how do I unlock", "data connection refused", "remove enterprise activation", etc. If a match is found, give the user a message saying "This <link here> FAQ will answer questions about <positive string test>. Would you like to view it before submitting your post?"

I don't know... I think that too many people are just looking for handouts as opposed to working for a solution... I suppose that's just the way the world has gotten eh.

cd.

[corey@12mile]

And for the record... I do all of the things that ESR mentions in his before you post article... Which is why I have only really made 1 real post on BBF asking for help. The question never got answered, and is still unanswered to this day. Maybe it's not possible what I wanted to do... pretty much all my other posts have been helping people or namecalling with Aaron...

cd.

[Mark Rejhon]

Corey@12mile and bfrye, good ideas.

I prefer automated "Search Reminders". I find it annoying when users (And even other moderators) remind too often about search -- some of us just prefer the threads to die silently rather than be bumped up by a search reminder.

An occasional search reminder now and then is fine -- but when I click on 10 threads to see search reminders in ALL of them, it starts to be a bit excessive (I'm partially guilty of this, but I probably do it a lot less than some of the other mods. *hint* *hint*)

This site is overdue for a minor revision update, for things like these.

[spraven]

Originally Posted by corey@12mile

I wonder if it's possible to write a pre-verifier for posting that will scan for certain words and confirm whether it's a valid post, or a dupe of an existing post... when I say dupe, I mean look for phrases such as "how do I unlock", "data connection refused", "remove enterprise activation", etc. If a match is found, give the user a message saying "This <link here> FAQ will answer questions about <positive string test>. Would you like to view it before submitting your post?"
cd.

I know this is possible to have, as I have seen it on multiple support sites...but how easy it is to set up may be the qualifying question.

Just recently, when sending a request through T-Mobile's support system, it stopped me before the final "send" to say: "these items were found that may answer your question" (Ok, not word for word, but you get the idea). I thought about this forum when I saw that.

[jibi]

I think the pre-verifier screening would be a good idea, but I also think that it would potentially cause more queries to the database than Tom would prefer to have (in my opinion/experience). I will certainly look for something, though. It would be fairly easy to implement, I would think - afterall, PHP is pretty limitless.

scraven, just so you know, the answer to your question in which you got told to search for (and pointed to with a wrongful resolution thread for your issue)... if you want to add contacts to the SIM card, you can simply View and an Address Book entry and click on Copy to SIM Phone Book (and yes, I found that by searching for 'SIM address book' amongst a few other posts that were easy to deduce by topic name). However, I am not aware of a method to 'backup' the address book in bulk to the SIM.

With that said, I do appreciate your very first post which hints to the fact that you did do your own research/searching prior to posting for the answer. That is where I can actually appreciate a question, even if its one that had been asked prior (so long as its not on the first page of posts).

bfrye, I know you can do this with a little tinkering (may be an option or it may simply be a change to the PHP code in search.php), but I think changing the default search option to display as posts rather than as threads would be easier. Atleast that way, they could see where the word was used in context to the thread rather than having to sift through potentially useless topic descriptions that may or may not tell them why it was returned as a result (similar to results returned in Google).

[jibi]

*edit: bfrye, if you want to try this out as default search, go to the Templates then to Search Templates then to search_forums. about 3/4 down the template, you'll see this:

<label for="rb_showposts_0"><input type="radio" name="showposts" value="0" id="rb_showposts_0" $showpostschecked[0] />$vbphrase[threads]</label>
<label for="rb_showposts_1"><input type="radio" name="showposts" value="1" id="rb_showposts_1" $showpostschecked[1] />$vbphrase[posts]</label>

Just flip the 0 and 1 for showpostschecked[] variable. I guess test this out on MB but I think it should be a decent and worthy change for Tom to make here. I tested it on my own forum and it works fine.

[bfrye]

That's cool jibi. I'll give it a try.

I've actually found a hack that allows you to insert "rules and regs" type pages before/after posts, or before entering forums. Plus you can assign the rules/regs pages to groups.

I think one of these inserted between the time they get the newpost page and click the new post button, for users with <10 posts stating something like I mentioned above (or possibly in the OT search thread) might work. Going to give it a try and see what happens.

[jibi]

Yeah, vcdquality.com has that for their forums. Users' threads are screened for the first 10 posts and when anyone makes a post, it will put that as the intermediate redirect page. I'm sure they've made improvements to the hacks of this nature for vB3. Are you registered on vb.org?