Some SCN facts & stats
From 31/01/2013 of January until today (30/12/2014) I’m and active contributor of SCN, I try to help SCN members and help the SCN space, Why? Well, it’s been 5 years of using SCN as source of information, so I’m pretty grateful.
Of course you can be an active contributor, but that doesn’t mean you are a good meber, right? My top values be a good member are:
- Opening a discussion, blog, etc.
- Search before posting.
- Think about if is a basic question.
- Provide feedback.
- Contributing in open discussion, blog, etc.
- Alert the moderator if the discussion doesn’t follow the ROE.
- Don’t just focus on the problem solver hero attitude, some questions are not pointing to the right path, don’t help the OP to push the red button.
- Acknowledge blogs, documents which are useful.
In this almost two years, the most shocking part of be involved in the problems of other members is the lack of feedback, I’m not focusing on the beloved points, most of the cases the discussion drifts, “helloooooooo, anyyyyybodyyyyy there? I just spend some time to help youuuuuu, it helped? it worked? how did you solved it? did you die trying?”
This is the side of SCN which makes me really grumpy and to be honest, hard to handle, here comes the stats:
- Total discussions where I been involved: 418
- Discussion has the right answer, that doesn’t mean the discussion must be close, that meas if you read it, it’s close 🙂
- Discussion doesn’t have the right answer, no one knows how to solve it (candidate to the Solvedbymyslef category)
- Discussion without any feedback from the OP, some answers can be marked as helpfull, but you can’t know how the issue was solved (candidate to the Solvedbymyslef category): 197
- “Shut up and do my Job”, the OP just throws questions, no search, no fight, just do it for me, please (candidate to the Solverbymyself category)
- Solvedbymyself, the OP closes the threat with the “Solved by myself” sentence, so you can’t know how the issue was solved
Another point of view:
Hi Louìs,
I'm absolutely with you. People are taking time to ask and afterwards not coming back to share their solution(s). That is a really big point, but I think this is not a SCN problem, moreover it is a "internet"-problem. People do not need to show up with their person and so they don't care...
Sad, but true.
~Florian
Thanks for your feedback Florian, Internet just powers the leech attitude and I agree with you is not a something specific of SCN you can find it in other forums or even in the p2p world 😉 the topic is quite complex.
I understood your point and let me twist the sentence a little 🙂 It's a SCN problem, let's put an hipotetical case, ME, after looking that stats my conclusion is: I'm putting too much effort/energy/time on SCN. There's no ROI and eventually I'll stop contributing on SCN, maybe just answer some random questions or write some blogs, until my activity will be 0 (just allow me to be a little dramaqueen 😉 )
In two years I've seen some SCN members who did an average of 2-3 contributions (or more) per day until some day they just disapear, probably they just got into this conclusion sooner than me or someone/somewhat is hunting down the SCN members.
Maybe you are right.
I agree with your point of view and I think there are some out there doing that exact the way you mentioned.
In my opinion it is not that easy to figure out. Spending the time on SCN might end in some wasted time, of course. On the other hand you also get a lot of interesting new topics or even new sights on problems you handle every day.
Simple example and might not true for everyone. You converted your local classes to global classes step by step, so create the class, the methods and copied the source into it.
Now you do it with the converter via SE24 because you humbled over a blog here on SCN. This saves you 15 minutes per week. Isn't it worth to spend time here?
That means you can waste 60 minutes every month without losing time at all:-)
Another point of view. Are you sure you spend your "free" time (I mean the time, you do not surf on SCN) also for learning something new? I'm not sure what I would do with the new given time...
~Florian
Honestly I have limited my personal contributions (answering questions) to those where I'm facing the same problem and need to solve it either now or in the future. My pace of answering has slowed down because there are a lot of other people answering stuff first, most stuff is already answered or it doesn't match my current interests.
There is a lot more personal gain by reading SCN. However the days of getting great regular technical contributions have ended since blogs have turned into either marketing or "ranting". The moment that "step-by-step" how-to guides got relegated to the wiki is one way SCN lost some of the content that drew people in.
There is also no benefit for creating documents/blogs on SCN in terms of recognition points. Not that I really need anymore recognition points, but answering questions provides a greater points for time invested than blogging. The amount of feedback and comments on blogs is not as much as it was earlier. It's hard to stay motivated as a blogger without comments 🙂 .
Finally I think if we shifted this back to five years ago, I think you would have noticed something similar on SCN.
Take care,
Stephen
100% with you...For me, I have seen these kinda posts mostly in SAP CRM-WebUI space. Even a small doubt of reading an entity, people will put that in SCN and ask 'Please please please' or "very urgent" as if they are on fire. And the funny thing is that, there are lot of people who enjoys answering such silly questions and getting points.
To be honest, points do matter as it helps in some other aspects like visibility in front of others. However, there are people who are addicted to points and do answer very basic questions(even I had done the same at the beginning.). And one more fact is that, WebUi space moderators are not monitoring the threads closely. We can't blame them as they do this job in their spare time. But this makes SCN a place to dump all questions.
Thanks,
Faisal