By only ever linking people to results on your website, you are making
people very dependent on you and your material. I don't think that's
fair to the technical community.
No other experts or MVPs do that.
I do it too, to an even larger degree than many others.
There are several very good reasons for this. One is that for
many symptoms there is a whole list of possible causes, and I
cannot always write them into every message. I also find that I
tend to forget the less likely causes when I try to compose a
direct reply. Another, related one is that a web site is
designed with much more care than a single newsgroup message.
Hence, they cater to both novice
end users, and the technical community.
It's a shame, because when you answer a thread, another expert may
choose not to, and so all we get is your material.
I see you want to advertise your skills/services "PC Chuck's network".
It wouldn't be a bad idea to set up your own google group!
You may well have many customers. .
MVPs aren't likely to do that, except in much narrower niches
like developers, because it would suffer from the same problems.
By the way, my experiences with giving advice in a newsgroup
aren't very good. The case that somebody describes a problem and
an MVP comes, understands it, and can solve it perfectly, is
rare. The case that somebody comes to a newsgroup and expects to
obtain a solution to his problem with a minimum of effort,
preferably less effort than the MVP expends to solve it, is
frequent.
I could go on telling really frustrating stories about newsgroup
users who don't follow the given advice and even lie about it in
an attempt to force others to do their work, but I have to watch
my available time too.
-) I have, for the most part, withdrawn
from the newsgroups, because I believe they are of very limited
efficiency, and rely on people finding my web site through
search systems like Google. The number of hits they get seems to
confirm that this works quite well, I believe better than the
newsgroups. I am sure that the usefulness of the time I spent is
quite a bit higher than any newsgroup activities.
An interesting example is the
http://winhlp.com/wxnet.htm web
page. It contains diagnostic tools that allow me to check what a
user actually did.
The results are very interesting. I get a lot of emails from
unknown people thanking me for the web site. In the newsgroups,
I sometimes direct somebody to the page, and sometimes get a
newsgroup reply that the user did everything described on the
web page, and that I should give him more help. I then always
find that the user didn't actually follow the advice on the web
page, or the user stops responding. The case that a user tries
to solve a problem through the web page, fails, and there is
actually a mistake or a gap on the web page, is very, very rare.
When it happens, perhaps once or twice a year, I always amend or
extend the web page instantly.
So the conclusion is that web sites are actually very useful for
many users, particularly for those who are willing to put in
some of their own effort in solving their problem.
The only thing I could not provide is assistance to totally
inexperienced and technically uneducated users. The only thing I
do for them is to point them to step-by-step guides on other web
sites. Unfortunately the effort to help a very unsophisticated
user is so high and the resulting efficiency so low that I
simply cannot expend the time.
Hans-Georg
