It has been said People posting answers via email, but I would like to pinpoint a distressing trend. Every single day I encounter a thread that asks for material to be sent to an e-mail address. The opposite also happens. Instead of answering the question, people ask the thread poster for an e-mail address to send information to.
This is sad - very sad. SDN is all about sharing knowledge, and e-mailing things is in contradiction with that principle. Why are people then expecting e-mails? Are they so selfish that they want to keep the material all to themselves?
As pointed out in the above mentioned forum thread, the complaint is sometimes that one can’t provide any attachments. As with many other forums, that is indeed the case. The forum server would be directly flooded if everybody got the chance to upload attachments. I myself have encountered people that don’t look at the footprint when they upload something. What’s the purpose of sending a picture of 300Mb if a 100Kb file is sufficient enough to show things on the web. The SDN web log system is the perfect example of that.
Together with the wiki, it’s also the best solution for the so called gap within the forums if you want to share some knowledge which needs to be clarified by pictures. They say that pictures say more than 100 words can say.
That’s true if they are your own words. I sometimes feel that the latter isn’t always true when one wants to e-mail material. It occurs to me that sometimes e-mail material can’t bear the light of day, meaning that it concerns material that is copyright protected. Let us be clear, it’s ILLEGAL to copy/distribute material without the permission of the owner/author of the material.
If permission had already been given, it would already have been available online and the ONLY thing you should do is to put a link to it when you answer a question. Copy/pasting content of online material without any reference to, or permission from, the owner/author is also illegal. Copy/pasting huge content isn’t advisable anyway. It results in clutter which is barely readable. This /thread/435315 [original link is broken] is (update: the thread is deleted) a perfect example of how things shouldn’t be done. It’s a cluttered thread where on top of that e-mail addresses are asked for. The posters of the answers should know better.
If you feel that valuable info is missing and you do have clearance to publish it, you can always contact the SDN/BPX admins or, as Marilyn points out, contribute it yourself. All this will result in even better content on the SN site and should prevent this egotism.
This type of selfish behaviour doesn’t pass muster. I would suggest that all offences to the sharing principle should be deleted without demur and recidivists should be warned and eventually punished when unteachable.
Meanwhile I take malicious pleasure in the fact that people don't seem to realize that their e-mail address can be gathered by search engines and harvesters. A simple test delivered me 400 yahoo and 444 google e-mail accounts. And I’m not talking about the other e-mail addresses which are easy to find. All of these are possibly subject to spam. At some point they will receive information other than on how to enlarge their SAP knowledge.
P.S. Which type of SDN Ubergeek/BPX suit are Which type of SDN Ubergeek/BPX suit are you??
Deadline: June 15th
