A thought-provoking read for the SUMO community, perhaps?
It's so regular you could set your watch by it. The decay of a community is just as predictable as the decay of certain stable nuclear isotopes. As soon as an open source project, language, or what-have-you achieves a certain notoriety—its half-life, if you will—they swarm in, seemingly draining the very life out of the community itself.They are the Help Vampires. And I'm here to stop them.
This might also be a good time to re-draw attention to my document "How To Ask Good Questions" - a short primer, written very carefully to be understandable to those for whom English is a second language, on how to ask good support questions in technical forums.
Posted by gerv at July 30, 2009 10:30 AM | TrackBackThere's another version here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=260935 . This one is probably preferable because it appears concise. Courtesy is often a problem and I don't see any mention of that. I also missed the part about not claiming a bug.
Posted by: VanillaMozilla at July 30, 2009 1:21 PMBy "this one" I meant "yours" is preferable. Forums should consider placing something similar to this where users cannot avoid seeing it before posting.
Posted by: VanillaMozilla at July 30, 2009 1:35 PMHah, it's a small world after all. As you may know, I lead development for SUMO, and Amy Hoy (the author of the article you link to) is a great friend of mine - we worked together at my last job pre-Mozilla. I read the article when she first wrote it, and think there is some good stuff in there.
Posted by: Laura Thomson at July 31, 2009 4:05 PMAlthough someone else has commented that we don't want to fall into the opposite trap of assuming people are Help Vampires too early, and chasing off genuine newbies. I guess some communities are more prone to one mistake and others to the other.
Posted by: Gerv at July 31, 2009 4:24 PM