Forums. Are they good?
I like helping people. Really I do.
That's actually the main reason I keep on writing in my blog. I like to think (rightly or wrongly) that some of the code samples that I write down are useful to people. I know people read a lot of my posts (especially the code sample ones) by reading my referrers - I'd say a good 60-70% of all people that read my blog arrive via a google search. It'd be nice if people would leave a comment to say they read it and liked it and used it, but the way I see it is that no bad feedback means good feedback :)
In case you're interested, here's some recent ones that get me on the first page of results:
Side note: sometimes some scary ones also bring you to me or my blog. I discovered this one the other day (sorry Mitch, I've been meaning to show you!) mitch denny porn canberra.
I think my favourite blog related google search would have to be a search for 'Sahil Malik' in google images. You don't get him, you get Aishwarya Rai and a picture of me. Fantastic.
But I digress. A lot. I was talking about helping others.
I don't like using newsgroups. There's a whole lot of idiots there, and more often than not things seem to end in fights.
But Forums can be good. I'm sure they can be good. The main one I participate in is the Windows Forms Forums. More often than not people who ask questions are in a (way) different timezone, but sometimes I can come in and answer some doozies for people.
But that site is moderated, and lately it's gone way downhill. Two weeks ago I did probably about 10 replies in the course of an hour, and it took a week and a half for my answers to actually appear on the site. I don't know what's going on there, but I'm not going to be going back very often with service like that. I'd hate to have been the guy waiting for the answer.
The other big forums site is www.asp.net, but I don't know as much about ASP.net as I do about...well, everything else :) The MSDN forums look promising, but I haven't had a chance to really check them out yet. The first time I was there no one had posted yet, but it looks like it's getting some traffic now :)
And then of course there's the CodeBetter Forums! They haven't really started to take off yet. I think that CodeBettter is mostly known for the high quality (and Sahil) blogs, and I imagine most people who read us use RSS aggregators, so you never see that we have a full swag of forums too.
But I'm worried about when people start really using them. Forums require me to actually remember to go and look. They require me to search through it, looking for people needing help about something I might be able to help with.
The biggest problem is remembering to look.
Any individual forum post can be tracked in email, which is good. I know when someone replies, since the reply is emailed to me.
But how do I know about new ones?
Why isn't there an RSS feed with extracts of all new posts on the forums? If new questions were delivered to me, I could see straight away the ones of interest and go there and post my advice/opinion.
Why isn't there? I want it. I want it now!
PS: my sister convinced me to give audioscrobbler a go. It's interesting. As I play songs in winamp (or whatever media player you like) it updates your list of recently listened to songs on a public website (see the link in the listening line). Not sure if it's really useful, but I'm doing it. We'll see how it goes :)