Yesterday, I wondered into the ASP.NET forums, and stayd for a while, going over many of the topics and answering a few of the questions there.
And you know what? I'm prefer mail lists or NNTP myself, but actually, it has one of the better HTML interfaces for forums out there. Quite usable, actually.
I do have a few observations on two things that surprised me:
- The number of unanswered posts is quite high
- The number of off-topic questions is even larger
The latter was quite surprising to me because most of the forums are moderated. I'm not sure what to make of it, but it seems to me that either the moderators are not quite reading the questions before allowing them through, or they don't have very clear what the topic of the forum is supposed to be. I mean, comm'on... a question on using the serial port on an EnterpriseServices forum? I can't be the only one to find that strange, am I?
4 Comments
archived from WordPress — closedI too prefer mailing lists. And when setup correctly they are less prone to spam as well (at least the mailing lists the accept emails from registered users).
Regarding newsgroups, take a look at the Microsoft newsgroups. While there's plenty to choose from, unfortunately plenty of spam finds its way through as well. Oh, and searching a mailing list archive is a big plus. What happens to all those messages at newsgroups?
I've been around the ms newsgroups for years! It's how I became an MVP, mostly :)
As for searching them, that part is easy... just hit http://groups.google.com/ which indexes them!
Yep, Google Groups totally slipped my mind. Thanks for the reminder :)
IIRC, the ASP.NET forums are "sort of" moderated. Meaning, once you post a certain amount or a moderator manually flips you, you become a trusted member and your posts go through automatically. A while back they had more than 50,000 members, so I imagine the trusting happens automatically and therefore there's probably not much real moderation going on--which is probably reasonable given the high amount of traffic.
In other words much noise, moderate signal. That said, there are good discussions there and it's probably one of the better places for searching for info specific to ASP.NET (but I've never really gotten any great answers to questions personally).