Since I started working as the technical editor for the XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 reference book I thought I’d try my hand at helping out on the Wrox Programmer to Programmer (P2P for short) forums.
When I first started out I was a ‘Starting Member’ but soon progressed to ‘New Member’.
Not long after that I noticed I’d gone up in status to ‘Junior Member’, which I actually found to be slightly condescending! I’m 33, I’m hardly a junior anything anymore.
Now however I’ve just passed the 200 post mark and I’m now a plain ‘Member’, although I do get 3 funky red stars to my name.
I help out mostly on the XSLT forum, but I’ve been straying onto the C# and C# 2005 forums of late too. I find the post volume is about right for me to not get overloaded – compared to the Microsoft Forums where I can barely keep up. Luckily the Microsoft forums has a helpful ‘answered’ feature, so you can easily see which posts still need help.
However for some reason sometimes when I click on the ‘Reply’ button it logs me out – very annoying.
Overall though I find helping out others useful as makes me think about the way I work, plus I try to write my proposed solutions in a way that they should hopefully learn a little without just writing out the answer for them. Its the way I would want to be answered.
Still, the most annoying thing is those questions where the answer is on the first page of the results I find when I search google. Is it just laziness do you think? My typical response to these is now just “Google is your friend”.
Sam: Thanks so much for all your answers in the forums. It’s great to have you so involved there. FYI, we are in the early planning stages of moving our forums to some newer software next year and improving many things, including how we recognize valuable contributors like you. But it’s really your participation that makes the forums valuable, not the platform they run on. :)
33 sounds junior to me, sonny ;-)