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”.