My take on pop-up questions

[Matt]

Can we all just ignore these now...please? I mean honestly, these
questions about how to kill pop-ups from the messenger service
are asked like every day...literally! If someone knows enough to
find this newsgroup, then don't you think they are intelligent enough
to do a simple search and find the 1200 times that Jonathan Kay
has answered it? Seriously, I'm starting to believe these are trolls
or some group of people getting their jollies out of how many
times they can post the same damn question to a newsgroup and
actually get a reply. It's nearing the point where I don't even want
to read this group anymore. At the very least, if you're going
to reply can't you simply ask them to scroll down 2 lines to find the
answer instead of encouraging this conspiracy.

Please...stop the insanity!

Matt

 

[Jonathan Kay [MVP]]

Greetings Matt,

I honestly don't believe that's what's going on -- the problem is very, very, very
widespread. Recently I was at a relatives home and they asked me if I knew anything about
this "spam" they were getting -- you guessed it, the Messenger Service.
____________________________________________
Jonathan Kay
Windows MVP, Messenger
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/
Messenger Resources - http://messenger.jonathankay.com

 

[Matt]

Ok, maybe I went a bit overboard with the conspiracy thing...but still,
I am surprised that someone could be "net-savvy" enough to find this
newsgroup and post to it, yet they don't have enough sense to browse
a few posts or do a search before asking a question. Can't we simply
reply by asking them to scroll down to a previous reply instead of
encouraging endless posts of the same question?

 

[bubba]

Hey Matt, relax. Some people aren't as net-savvy as
you. They don't have a whole day to go searching through
1600 pages of questions. Frankly, instead of answering
questions, the Microsoft MVPs really should spend more
time just preventing some of these problems from
happening.

BBEE

 

[Andrew McDonald]

Using a news client is slightly trickier than web-based forum software so you might expect people to
be more net-savvy in a newsgroup, but MS in particular make good use of a web-based newsgroup reader
and direct people to their newsgroups from all over the site; it's one of their main suggested
support channels. So people coming into the website, which is a huge number, get directed here with
less computing knowledge required than using a news client.

On the other hand though, there is always at least one of these net send questions on the front page
so you might expect people to notice that regardless of client used. But of course if people stopped
posting these questions they would disappear from the front page and eventually expire from the
server anyway, so that wouldn't be any good for finding an answer

MS really should have turned the service off by default for XP (Home at least), no-one needs it
except corporate sys admins who should be sufficiently knowledgable to turn it on anyway if they
want it. Perhaps if SP2 were to disable the service upon installation, but make it clear in the
readme that it would do so, the problem would be solved. Sys admins would be notified that it was
disabled and turn it on again after installation. Everyone else wouldn't care and it would simply
stop the spam.

Andrew

 

[John Eckart]

I hear allot of people complaining about popups, but I have yet to see one. I'm starting to wonder if you all have adware in your systems. Try cleaning your systems with Lavasoft's Ad-aware and see if it fixes your problems.

 

[Sigfrid]

If the problem is so ubiquitous, why isn't a description
and solution in an easily found knowledge base article?