Support the site.

Yes, this is a community forum.Which its sole purpose is to let customers interact with each other by giving technical assistance to those who need it. This forum is just starting, and its beginning to gain support from customers who uses VS2005. Yes, I agree with you that many questions are getting unanswered, which means this forum needs more community members to answer the questions posted by other community members.
cheers,

Paul June A. Domag

PaulDomag at 2007-10-6 >

He is right! This is what I am talking about. I have had questions that I have posted and they never get answered. Problems that I need help with. Even the Microsoft Partener site has the same problem and those questions are suppose to be reviewed by MS people.

I have gained a lot of useful information from reading questions and answers and I have had some very useful help. I hope I have provided help. But there have been questions that I have had no answer. I realize there are a lot of questions and many MVP do a wonderful job of helping. But when you need some help there is not place to turn but these sites.

We are asking the group at Microsoft that creates these sites to give some consideration to the fact that having a place to place questions is great but there needs to be answers. Maybe there are too many of these community sites.

I am greatful that Microsoft provides this opportunity for people to find answers. It needs looking at by some one higher on the chain of command.

Regards,

SailFL at 2007-10-6 >

Thanks for the reply. I don't want to detract from the efforts of the people that are here: 1000 posts per day is a big workload

I know that the easier questions attract more attention by nature, but until some user somewhere has the answer to a hard one there can be no solution to share here. Also you are probably noticing a huge insurgence of bugs with people upgrading to 2005. These are not the sort of thing another user can help with, but I will keep my fingers crossed that there is more help available once, as you say, more people migrate and start to use this forum.

And yes, this forum was very hard to find first time around. I still to this day can't find the Microsoft bugs site again. labs.microsoft.something or other. Its a hard trade-off - do you make the site publicly known (look at the number of people here posting questions about upgrading to WinXP) or do you keep it out of sight making it hard for people who really need it to find?

Anyway, I'm rambling on: just wanted to say my experiences here are not all negative.

Cheers, cyas round the forum (what I wanna know is, what was wrong with gotdotnet?)

Freqy at 2007-10-6 >

Hi David.

Yes, I've seen you around, you were one of the reasons I decided to follow up my original post in this thread. I apologise if I was a bit agressive with my assertions.

I agree that I've broken points 3, 4 and 8 of the rules. The reason I began following this thread is that I believe the original poster is on to something.

I've recently migrated from an Enterprise class product to a free product. I don't expect the same level of support whilst running 'chumpware' , however - my experience has been terrible: It's taken me about a month (with the much appreciated help from this forum) to get my working, regularly releasing project back on the road.

Much of this time was spent posting uselessly on forums that have died, searching for places like this, and trying to convince people I had a real problem. I may be wrong, but I thought that the questions I was asking were simple and the reason I was getting no response was that people simply decided that someone running such a large code-base and hacking away at their code after migrating probably just has some issues to sort out - I have to admit having been a 'lurker' myself its the kind of question I'd skip over.

So what I'm really getting at, and what I think the original poster was on to was:

1) Its too hard to find this forum. forums.microsoft.com seems pretty obvious, but I never found a direct link from any other developer subsites of MS.

2) There doesn't appear to be enough people here yet who know this stuff inside out.

and my own addition:

3) seriously need a forum for people who are switching to 2.0 and someone who wrote the stuff to answer the questions - it's only going to get worse in this respect.

So I broke points 3, 4 and 8 because of my situation:

I've just switched to Express, and there is a forum for it which is bound to be newer than the .NET general thread right?

And points 3 and 4: Start new windows app, first line of code: System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.Name = "blah", then run the app and see if you see a thread called 'blah' start or stop in the output window. I thought that was too obvious to put in a post. ... and that someone would do said test and tell my there was something wrong with my install or something.

So, I'm seriously trying to jump in to this community as a questioner and an answerer, but there's not enough info about what I'm doing coming from anyone. But dude my hat comes off to you for putting up with people like me and (is it possible?) worse.

Crikey, I'm really crapping on. I apologise for that, and for flaming the suggestions forum. But seriously, if I can help people avoid what I've been through in any way I'm gonna try.

Over and out.

Freqy at 2007-10-7 >

Probably time for the "official" Microsoft answer, huh?

Our goal with these forums was never to have every single question reviewed and answered by a Microsoft employee. To be honest, the volume on these forums already makes that impossible (we are now over 2,000 questions per week). All of the product teams in the Developer Division (Visual Studio and the .NET framework), along with the SQL Server team have committed to monitoring their forums and helping out as much as they can. Some teams have been great with this (our C++ team and VSTS team have been centers of excellence), and some have not, but Josh Ledgard and I, who "own" the MSDN Forums, are constantly reminding teams to get involved. We actively track every forum's question counts and answer rates, and I make monthly posts in the Announcements forum sharing these rates with the community. We want everyone to know that we aren't pretending these forums are a perfect solution yet...but we are trying to get better everyday. We actively monitor, on a daily basis, the two-day and three-month answer rates on the forums overall as well. For today, we are at:

2 Day Answer Rate: 41.43% (Goal=60%)

3 Month Answer Rate: 50% (Goal=90%)

Are we happy with those answer rates? Absolutely not. But by posting them here, I hope you realize that we really do care about them and want to share the challenge we have here with the community. You all are the reason these forums are here.

We are also working on tracking the percentage of answers that come from Microsoft versus coming from the community. Currently, Microsoft is answering about 60% of the questions in the forums. Unfortunately, it's hard to see this right now, because many of us haven't put "- MSFT" after our display names yet. But they are out there...and these are the same people who wrote the features that you need support on.

The solution to raising answer rates is community involvement. Josh and I use the phrase "self-sustaining community" to describe how we picture the forums a year from now. In a self-sustaining community, if Microsoft was to stop participating in the forums (which we have no plans to ever do!), the community would be able to field most of the questions. Currently, we simply don't have enough community moderators and answerers. We are working on ways to make this better everyday, and some future forums improvements should greatly help--including future plans to allow community moderators to escalate questions to Microsoft (although this is still a couple of months away.)

Our goal with the forums is to provide an free avenue for customers to get answers to their questions, but, if you need an immediate answer to your problem, you can always contact our pay-per-use Customer Service & Support team.

I'll also agree with David and Paul and say that it's extremely important when you are posting to really ask yourself: "Is this question written in a way that somebody understands all of the context around the problem I'm having?" If you aren't writing clear subjects (NEVER use something like "I need help!" or "SQL Connection Problem"...they are too vague), nobody's going to want to read your question.

As for discoverability, those are great comments to hear, and I'm working with our MSDN contact to make sure we get more links to the forums there ASAP. We noticed that many of our customers are arriving through the help system in Visual Studio and SQL Server, which actually searches the forums and has links to the forums built right into the menu system in the product.

I really do appreciate your comments and suggestions, and you should know that both Josh and I have read through this thread, along with Jana, the product manager from the Microsoft.com team that builds the forums. Please continue to post suggestions on ideas on how we can make these forums better--we aren't going to be satisfied until this is the best online developer support community on the Internet.

JoeMorel-MSFT at 2007-10-7 >