Top Answerers - December 2005
The year is over…lets see how we closed out 2005 in the MSDN Forums!
December 2005
Top (11) Answerers Across all of the MSDN Forums:
Ayman Shoukry continues to take top honors on the forums, followed closely by Martin Richter—our top community member for December! Congratulations! In total, the top ten posters contributed1,537 answers in December, way higher than in November! Awesome! There are quite a few new names on this list—welcome, and thanks for helping out!
Top Answerers Across all of the MSDN Forums, All-Time:
Vikram, our top all-time poster, finally broke through 1,000 questions answered! Wow! Vikram—where did you go? All time, the forums have answered33,744 questions! We are now starting to push towards 2,500 questions asked every week! At this rate, these forums will be more heavily trafficked than the Microsoft Developer newsgroups by this summer!
Also, we’d like to welcome David Kean to Microsoft! David was a great community member, and recently joined Developer Division! We’re glad to have you on board!
Who were the top subject experts in December?
WinForms Top 3
VSTS Top 3
SQL Top 3
VB Top 3
VC++ Top 3
VC# Top 3
Remember—mark the best replies as answers!
Top 10 DevDiv Teams by Answer Rate in December
Congratulations to these teams who have the highest answer rates for questions asked in December! The overall forums 2 day answer rate dropped to 39% in November, with the total answer rate only 47%...most likely because of the holidays. Let’s work on pulling these back up!
Top 10 Forums With the Highest Opportunity for Improvement…
We need help in these forums…if you consider yourself an expert in any of these areas, this a great way to help your fellow developers (not to mention eventually earn moderator privileges…) :)
Hi Joe,
First of all Congratulations to all the Top Answerers of the month.
I am happy to be the first one to cross the 4 digit answers mark 
. And I'll be back soon - kind of drowned in work right now!
Regards,
Vikram
Joe,
Are you sure you haven't mixed up the last two tables? The bottom forums seem to have the better answer rate. The user links are broken as well, you need to remove the /t_blank from the href.
Again, the stats are pretty much bogus since moderators mark their non-answers as answers.
Example "Answers":
"Please post in the proper MS Newgroup"
or
"Post your question in the asp.net forums"
The above are marked as answers when they should be "Locked" or something similar.
Carl
Carl,
The reason these are marked as answers are so that they don't clog up the unanswered list.
These posts are regularly removed and don't count towards the answered questions.
Nice cover up work deleting all those non-answer "answers", but hey..don't all jump up to admit there is a problem tho...sheesh.
Carl
Carl,
I haven't covered the issue up, in fact I have raised the issue internally on the moderator forum. I then proceeded to remove the off-topic posts so that they don't continue to affect the internal/external statistics and pollute the search any longer.
I regularly clean up these off-topic posts (on a week by week basis), however, as Ayman's replies didn't contain the word 'off-topic' in the post, they were missed.
Regards
David
Thanks for replying. I'm not trying to bust your balls here David, but at least you see the problem.
I just don't see the reasoning to mark non-answers as answers. Lock them, delete them, move them to a Off-Topic forum or whatever.
The "Cluttering" of non-answered posts really doesnt make any sense as you just end up moving the clutter from one place to the other, if you see my point.
ie: Someone browsing for answers sees a lot of posts like what were shown in my other post.
Carl
Maybe Joe could do a re-run of the december top posters? That would seem fair.
It's a good thing you pointed this out Zep! We are trying hard to solve issues like these, but you don't often see the discussions, they're in the moderator's forums.
No problem Jelle, just figured if your going to get some kind of "kudo" once a month, you should at least deserve it...or maybe that's just me. :)
And David, I have to say you have been doing a great job as of late answering things with real answers. :)
Carl
I understand the concern here, but I'm going to have to decline to rerun the top answerer post for December. We'll see what happens next month. I'm going to be working with jledgard, my manager, and try to figure out a long-term strategy around this. Based on the guidelines that we have given internal Microsoft employees around off-topic posts, this is going to happen for another couple of months.
Hi Joe,
Maybe a good long term idea would be to have a button to mark a post as Off-Topic. Once a post is marked as off-topic, it should automatically get deleted after a week or so. That removes the need to delete them later as well and makes a moderator's life easier 
Regards,
Vikram
THAT IS ONE GREAT IDEA VIKRAM!!!!!!!
Hi all,
First of all, sorry for not deleting or marking some of the posts as otp in the past. I didn't know about that. I used to go and delete some of the posts my self after a while but I haven't been active about deleting such posts in the last period.
For sure that was not intenional from my side. I even don't really look at the statistics posted about top answeres and that explains only seeing this post now. (thanks to Daved Kean who sent me an email about it). My target is really the over all performance on the VC forums and not the personal numbers. Obviously from this thread such numbers act as a driving force for some folks which is a great benefit for the forums in general.
I have already went back to some of my posts and marked then with the string "otp". I will make sure to follow the same guidelines in my future posts.
List of the posts I have just marked with otp: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/Search/Search.aspx?words=ayman%20otp&localechoice=9&SiteID=1&searchscope=forumgroupscope&ForumGroupID=8
I am sure I have missed some but from now on I will be more strict on marking such posts. The button idea is great specially for the VC team where the off topic posts is high (mixing win32 API issues with VC speicfic issues is common). It is time consuming to go and delete a high number of posts at one time (I am already following if there is a way to bulk delete posts).
Thanks for raising the issue and sorry for any confusion I might have caused. It is just currently hard to handle a high number of off-topic posts.
EDIT:
I JUST DELETED THE ONES I MARKED AS OTP SO YOU MIGHT SEE THE ABOVE LIST EMPTY. CARL & EVERYONE, IF I MISSED ANY ONES, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO EMAIL ME THE LINK AT AYMANS AT MICROSOFT DOT COM. I WILL BE MORE THAN HAPPY TO DELETE THEM MYSELF.
Thanks,Ayman ShoukryVC++ Team
