MSDN Forums What’s Update – 5/7/2005
The big news has
already been posted. The Forums team rolled out a service pack that fixes issues with code formatting, smilies, alerts, and much more. Since that’s out of the way I’ll move into answering some of the questions that have been sent my way.What "Softies" are answering questions?
Plenty of Microsoft employees are engaged in the forums because they want you to be successful with beta 2. The list ranges from our front line developers to members of the leadership team.
Brian Harry is the Product Unit Manager for (meaning he is in charge of) the Team Foundation team! It’s great to see someone in his position taking the time to get in the trenches and see what people are saying about his product and answer some questions while he is there. I wonder if his participation is motivating some of the other Visual Studio Team Edition guys including…Buck is a developer for Team Foundation has been taking the time to listen to feedback and answer questions about the 1.0 product they are working on.Rob Caron has extended his scope of influence to encompass the forums in addition to hismost excellent blog. His partner in crime in the VSTS space has beenAjay.Bruce is a Developer in Test who has been doing his best to keep up with the feedback around the Team Foundation setup and administration.Eric Jarvi has been doing a great job with the Team Edition Developer and Tester forums.Other "Top 10 Softies" Outside of the VSTS Team...
Luke Hoben owns the Express forum and has been answering questions there. This has been the busiest forum by far.Bret is one of the owners of the VS setup forum. You can imagine that he’s been pretty busy.Lisa, the fearless Forums PM, has done a great job keeping up with the site feedback forums. She's had some help fromFili.
If I missed you then I apologize. As with the last update this is an ad-hoc list created based on my observations on the forums site without the aid of a tool to get these stats… yet.
Do you guys pay attention to these questions?
I assure you, this is thefriendly rewrite of one forum member’s question. Teams that sponsor forums are goaled on the answer rate as a measure of the health of their communities. This doesn’t mean that they have to be the ones providing all the answers.
If the developer community is well educated because of other team efforts like help content, webcasts, blog posts, ease of use, etc it’s possible that no one from Microsoft would ever need to answer a forum question. If you want to see more about what happens inside Microsoft when you ask a question today you should
read this.It shouldn’t shock you, after seeing the list of high volume internal participants above, that the group with the best answer rate (and more than 20 questions) is the
Visual Studio Team System guys. Their forums have an 82% answer rate. Great work!Should I cross post my question in multiple forums?
Ok, no one asked this question, but a few people have forced the moderation staff to answer it. The answer is NO. Please do not post the same question in multiple forums. I know the people doing this probably noticed they had to change some text each time because we tried to prevent pure duplicates.
There is a reason for this. It clutters the forum search results, forces people to answer your questions multiple times, and ultimately makes other forum member not want to answer your future questions. If you see someone posting duplicates please don’t hesitate to use that "report" button to alert the moderation staff. We’ll delete duplicate questions and merge threads have already been answered twice. Just don’t do it.
Forum Tip: Quickly Jump Between Forums
This feature is hidden, but useful. If you are reading a forum or a thread there is a "(Please Select)" dropdown in the lower right hand corner of the forum content. Expanding this dropdown will show the list of forum on the site. Picking one will jump you into that forum view!
