Help for Newsgroup Postings

Ever have a situation where you needed to ask a highly technical question on the newsgroups but didn’t know where to start?  Of course, you should start at the forums on SQLMag.com, but even then you might not know what to do.

Well, the Microsoft Knowledge Base now has an article just for you.  Check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375 to see what MVP Daniel Petri has to say about the solution.

Articles like this have actually been floating around the web for quite a while on other MVP personal sites and blogs, such as these:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=507#info

http://cpearson.com/excel/newposte.htm

Of course, you’ll find some people who question the whole methodology of answering questions via the web.  Back in the old days when people actually had to do research by going to the library and picking up a book off of a shelf, people were given training on how to logically approach research.  Now, because it’s so easy, many researchers are just plain scatterbrained and their research techniques completely lack any for of methodology.  This phenomenon gives rise to blog entries like the one at this URL

http://mikeswss.blogg.de/eintrag.php?id=219 entitled “Are (newsgroup) users getting more stupid?”

So I’m curious to hear what you think.  Have you seen newsgroup entries that say something like “My professor wants us to apply a stylesheet to an webpage.  Can you please give me the exact code to make this happen?”  Or maybe you’ve seen questions on newsgroups that have been answered a couple dozen times in the last few weeks alone.  Does this make you feel that people, in general, are getting dumber and/or lazier?

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,

-Kev