Is it good to be back?

[craigcmehil]

As I wrote in a blog about Communities emerging.... things there went PERFECT! However not everything did here on SDN in that time. Now by writing this I'm probably doing what they call "political suicide" however I feel that the SDN community is one strong enough to realize what I am saying and why. My inbox for a little more than a week of being gone contained about 900 mails, now 300 of these where from my forum watches, newsletters, FYI's, etc. so I was able to quickly delete them, the remaining 600 or so were ones I needed to respond to. This leads me to my first gripe against many an individual here, it's regarding t-shirts. There are over 400,000 users registered on SDN - not all are eligible but many are. We've finally gotten a system in place where I send a list each week to a shipper who takes the time to kindly email everyone on the list and confirm their mailing address. Now for the most part this works, sometimes though things get lost in the mail and is seems to happen quite often going towards India - not sure if this is normal or not but what I can't stand is someone emailing me 4 times with a basic HATE MAIL demanding to know where their t-shirt is. (Be warned anyone responding to this blog about not getting their t-shirt most people now assume you are the hate mailer.) Look I feel horrible when someone doesn't get their shirt, so much so that I try to do everything I can to fix the problem, but I can't change the mail system. What I ask is that after 4 weeks if you have not received your mail and that is 4 weeks from the confirmation email you received about your address then do a REPLY to mail - by mailing me you delay the process. If there is a problem with that email not going through then PLEASE EMAIL ME! So day 1 back, stress level 20% thanks to "Hate mails". While I was on vacation I read 7 novels, a personal best for considering I had family visiting from the US, my wife and son here that all needed entertaining. Vacation was from May 25 (public holiday) to May 7. First day back was the 8th but the week was almost over. So now while I was out for so long the crossing over list and the Contributor's Corner was not updated, this is one of those things we as a team will need to remedy so that the updates continue regardless of me being here or not, as this is the Community Teams way of letting everyone know what is going on so be sure to check that page out each week!!! In fact I just updated it with some cool stuff going on, also take note of our Community and Techie Columns!

• A tale of two communities, a One Community or Two? for those wanting to know what's happening (don't foget to modify your SDN profile and check the box!)
• Eddy shows us the world, you need to Le petit monde de Freddy!
• TechEd is approaching as so is the SDN Day at TechEd'06, make sure you join in whether you are a Calling All BPXers - TechEd '06 is Not Just For SDNers or a Calling all Scripters! Come on we can't let them show us up! or a SDNer!
• A new GUI, what's this? Project Muse-- New GUI for SAP?

Together with our Community Reporters we hope to liven this area up and jam pack it with information for you every week! Your help there is always appreciated! So day 1 back, stress level 40% thanks to "Hate mails" complaints about page updates, stress level 15% because the pages are requested so much and the community wants them updated to know what is happening! THANK YOU! As I move into day two of being back (remember I have 3 days in the week at the end of my vacation), I have all these mails and problems concerning cheating in the forums, the SDN Member Referrals points, weblog applications, and junior blogs, etc. OK the SDN Member Referrals points mark.finnern/blog has been dealing with and the marilyn.pratt/blog has been dealing with the weblog related stuff. This leaves the big question about cheating in the forums. Day 2 stress level 50% + 15%(Day 1) = 65%, because people are so petty and inconsiderate to actually waste everyone's time here on SDN and cheat. One of the reasons why we've not announced any iPod winners is because of this, in fact that whole program my be canceled because some little inconsiderate and dishonorable person has decided to try and cheat the system. Now this is where I put my foot down and I will say it here and now - if you are cheating on SDN then you might as well go somewhere else because you are not wanted. I say no more alias names or funny email addresses, be honest about who you are or leave. I will flat out refuse to speak to anyone taking such dishonorable actions that goes for email, telephone and in person during TechEd (this is the part about "political suicide")! If you want the system or the way things work here on SDN to change then you simply need to speak up, BUT if the community as a whole does not agree with you and you attempt to take things into your hands to make changes then think again! Things get done here in respect to the community as a whole and not the minority. This goes for all things, if you want people to listen then you need to be open and honest about who you are and talk to us when we offer up a chance. You have a daily chance in the SCN Support forum and you also get chances through surveys, want to have your say and be part of the changes on SDN then speak up. So now that I've vented my stress level is back to only 35% this of course is higher than I would like. One of the nice things that I didn't find in my inbox were people complaining about NOT getting points, this used to be a distrubing trend on SDN, it still exists to some extent in the forums where people are doing "points begging", I won't name names though and I ask that you DO NOT NAME NAMES either in comments to this blog. I only ask that those of you out there "begging" for points simply stop. Better is to simply start keep tracking of the names of the users not giving you what you think you deserve in terms of points and ignore them in the future - for those of you who say points don't matter I don't expect to EVER see you "begging" or complaining about it. In all honesty the forums seem to be our "pain point" in terms of points [no pun intended] and that is the one area that we can not really control in terms of making a user give points. So here's a suggestion for ALL OF YOU. It's called Excel, please take the time and make an excel spreadsheet with columns called URL and Date. Save the URL of the thread in which you have not been rewarded points and the end of the month, look through the list to BE SURE you have still not been rewarded points, then EMAIL that spreadsheet to me. For all threads more than 30 days old that have had no points rewarded to you I will go through and see what I can do - HOWEVER if I do this and at the end you still have no points for that thread it's end of dicsussion no appeals. Also if I see that you have been given points even it was only 2 points then I will minus 1 point from your total. So if you send me a list of 50 URL's and in 10 of them you were rewarded points I will minus 10 points from your overall Total. Anyone who maintains a list of "ignore" users is welcome to send that to me as well and if I see individual names appearing on mulitple people I will contact that user and ask if there is a problem with rewarding points, remember not everyone believes in the point system and not everyone knows how to reward points so I will take this as an opportunity to communicate with them and maybe explain things better. That sounds fair doesn't it? stress level 10% for coming up with a nice alternative to a problem at hand - stress level 20% for giving myself more work to do. So day 2 now, over my stress level is 20%, all in all not bad. Meanwhile my inbox is down to 20 mails, a ton of tasks and meeting requests. Day 3, what can I say? I thought maybe I had the days wrong and it was already the weekend, the day was so quiet I got my inbox down to 0, my tasks down to 6 and my meeting requests all lined up. Going into the weekend my stress level was at a reasonable high of 5%. Today is now Monday, now my day started with me getting the Contributor's Corner all updated and back on schedule. Still not announced winners of the weekly iPod mini giveaway, but I have the names 😉 I got an email from our shipper than they sent out the last batch of shirts to get us up to date (granted only to those who responded to the mail asking to confirm their address) I also sent them the updates for weeks 18 to 22, so anyone who was listed in the "Crossing Over" during those weeks will be getting "possibly" your second shirt now. I realized I am no longer #2 on the Top Contributor's list Overall (will anyone remember me?) now I am number 4. This happens I guess when you get stuck dealing with things like cheating in the forums. Perhaps one day I will manage to find some time to contribute more... So where was I other than having just finished Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code yeah the other cool things that I had waiting for me in my inbox. A great thank you letter about our last cc_online_meetup_archive.htm (#10) and a new PHP mini app to be uploaded to SDN along with the latest version of Scripting in a Box v0.0.1. So for a Monday, other than the task of reliving some of the stressful things in this blog my week has started off rather well and perhaps you should keep your eyes open or I should say your ears for a new Podcast about the community from Mark and I and maybe we can convince Marilyn to give one about the BPX Community?! And yes it's good to be back...