Here I go again

[vasa1]

It's quite depressing to see the large number of trivial, meaningless posts being made. Some of them even border on spiteful.

The use of :) and ;) don't really negate the negativity.

Genuine requests for support hardly get any response but A versus B has everyone jumping on.

[synaptix]

What? lol

[Glencore]

What? lol

Pretty much what I thought :)

[forrestcupp]

It's quite depressing to see the large number of trivial, meaningless posts being made. Some of them even border on spiteful.

The use of :) and ;) don't really negate the negativity.

Genuine requests for support hardly get any response but A versus B has everyone jumping on.

This is about the most pointless thread I've ever seen started. :) ;)


(Just joking) ;) :)

[QIII]

Bah! I sure wasted my time reading this thread!

I could have been spending my time reporting spam.

Sheesh!

;). ;). :P

[TheMTtakeover]

This is about the most pointless thread I've ever seen started. :) ;)


(Just joking) ;) :)

Clearly your use of smiley faces don't negate the negativity of your post.

[PaulW2U]

It's quite depressing to see the large number of trivial, meaningless posts being made. Some of them even border on spiteful.

The use of :) and ;) don't really negate the negativity.

Genuine requests for support hardly get any response but A versus B has everyone jumping on.

I think I know what you're referring to but ...... :confused:


Bah! I sure wasted my time reading this thread!

I could have been spending my time reporting spam.

Leave the spam reporting to me. I need the beans more than you do. :lolflag:

[vexorian]

It's quite depressing to see the large number of trivial, meaningless posts being made. Some of them even border on spiteful.

The use of :) and ;) don't really negate the negativity.

Genuine requests for support hardly get any response but A versus B has everyone jumping on.
You could deal with this by replying to the legit help threads.

[forrestcupp]

Clearly your use of smiley faces don't negate the negativity of your post.

Put if you put

(Just joking)

on there, you can say whatever you want. ;)

[MG&TL]

It's quite depressing to see the large number of trivial, meaningless posts being made. Some of them even border on spiteful.

The use of :) and ;) don't really negate the negativity.

Genuine requests for support hardly get any response but A versus B has everyone jumping on.

Going to stick my neck out and agree with you. Also the number of "support" threads that are simply rants about software piece X, person Y, or corporation/distro Z is getting annoying.

But I'll still try my best to find genuine support threads.


You could deal with this by replying to the legit help threads.

We must have hundreds of dedicated contributors. Even if vasa was on here all the time, it would be a drop in the ocean.

It's definitely not the forum I joined. Maybe I'm just opposed to change, but in this instance, change is very definitely bad.

[vexorian]

The ocean is made of many drops.

[MG&TL]

The ocean is made of many drops.

Then say "help deal with". :P

[Mikeb85]

It's quite depressing to see the large number of trivial, meaningless posts being made. Some of them even border on spiteful.

The use of :) and ;) don't really negate the negativity.

Genuine requests for support hardly get any response but A versus B has everyone jumping on.

When you go to an actual café, what sorts of things do you hear people talking about? Cafés are for debates, lighthearted discussions, and lots of meaningless talk over a coffee or tea (café = french for coffee).

If anything, the Community Café should only be for trivial, meaningless posts. The spitefulness should be reduced however, on that we can agree...

[vexorian]

I don't think he was talking specifically about the Café.

[mevun]

I'll ignore the comment about trivial, meaningless posts. Instead I'll give my opinion on support questions/answers in the forum.

Basically, most support forums are inefficient, but work due to sufficient numbers. For any given subject, there's a small percent of people who know the answer and there's a chance that some of them will read the question and then there's a chance that some of those people are willing/have time to answer the question. So the reason some questions aren't answered is that these probabilities are too small. Obviously, a poorly worded question will have less chance that someone will answer or be willing to interact to get clarification.

For a well-defined question and answer, there are ways to improve the efficiency of a forum. One way is to use artificial intelligence to classify the questions by "tags" so that readers know what the question is about and then put those tags on the questions instead or in addition to letting the user add them. If the system also data mines all the posts for a user, it can figure out which "tags" that person has written about. Then any questions involving that tag could automatically show up for that user when he/she logs in to the forum in the hope that the user is more likely to respond. It'd be like a "questions you might be able to help answer" section to go along with the normal reverse-time questions.

Anyway, maybe data mining would creep people out too much. Askubuntu and Stackoverflow haven't implemented auto-tagging (I don't think) but they have more tag functionality. They might be better at support, but still not that great in my experience. I've asked questions on both (different ones) and gotten no response.

[KiwiNZ]

;) better we close it than let it melt down