by another_jim on Thu Sep 20, 2007 11:04 pm
Hi Susan,
Nice to see you here.
A bit of history: Until 2004, the only coffee forum was the alt.coffee news group, which had a relatively small core membership (i.e. people posting several times per week). These people knew and mostly respected each other, so that they occasionally telling one another that a post of theirs was ignorant, wrong or perverse didn't do much harm. Newbies asking questions were given rude but informative answers. If they had a thick skin and were enthusiasts, they stayed on; if they were missing one of these, they left.
CG and many of the Non US net fora opened in 2004 and 2005. They were to be kinder and gentler places were newbies got a friendly welcome. Mark got a lot of flak from other alt.coffee members for doing this; but it was clear that the day of newsgroups was passing -- new internet people simply didn't know gopher, news groups, ftp or anything else except the www existed. I, as one of the early moderators, was all for this, although frequently grumbling privately that I'm not the answer desk (I even got some angry emails from people when I became brusque, telling me I wasn't worth my salary).
Within a few years, it became clear that my grumbling was emblematic of many of the old timers feelings. There is always idle chatter on fora. It is fun if you know the people, and boring if you don't. With the membership exploding, the chatter by unknowns became overwhelming and tedious. Good user filters, like are found on newsgroup software, would help for this.
But the real problem is more serious. Newbies need to learn how to use a forum, and being ultra nice to them all the time doesn't accomplish this. There was an explosion of questions that had been answered correctly hundreds of times before posed by people unaware that it is mandatory to do a search before posting questions. Obviously, the experienced people just stopped answering.
This was the second big mistake. When experienced people stopped answering, people who knew nothing did. After a year of this, CG has become very much compromised as an information archive. A search will produce as many answers by people who don't know what they are talking about as people who do. So now it's pointless for newbies to do a search before asking a question, since they won't get a trustworthy answer. Historical note for non alt.coffee people: the regulars on alt.coffee thought the most valuable part of it was the archived posts that could be searched for good answers on most questions. This is what CG has now lost, perhaps irretrievably so.
This has led to the exodus of most of the experienced posters. HB has become their home, along with alt.coffee die hards finally tearing themselves away from the grave site, like Randy. HB has, ironically, become a bit of a reunion of alt.coffee regulars from 4 years ago. Of course, there are even more new enthusiasts, either home grown, or from CG's more exciting days.
Ken's being less than kind and gentle is a service to the community (granted it's one that he probably enjoys), since it cuts down on idle questions, and even more importantly, on idle answers.
