Those who contribute to or watch the portal area in SCN will probably recognise my name. I have been known to blog a bit and until recently I was one of the top points earners in the portal forums.
For the first 6 months of this year I was travelling a fair bit for work, and in the evening I would spend some of my time replying to forum posts. The travelling is now not as frequent and I am spending less time in SDN. Even after I stopped contributing, I'd still occasionally look at the recent posts to see if there were any 'interesting' ones to answer, but disappointingly they were few and far between. It seems most people posting won't spend a few(?) minutes searching before posting.
People like myself were actually unintentionally promoting this behaviour! Rapidly answered questions leads to people posting without thinking/searching.
My proposal is to lock new postings for a month. Open threads can still be replied to and moderators can still post if they are sent a post.
What will the reaction be? Hopefully people will start searching! The help.sap.com pages are a lot better than a lot of people realise. The portal wiki pages are also a good source of content.
There will probably be extra chatter in the non-portal forums as people try to bypass the embargo, so those forum moderators may need to be extra diligent....
