Invasion of the Forums

So recently, some $user entity joined a particular mailing-list. And starts asking questions. Nothing wrong with that!

Granted, quite a cannonade of questions. Sure, we can handle that. Showing off a profound lack of understanding what he’s dealing with. Right, we are patient, usually, and can explain (again) or point to specific doc sections (yet again). Asking quite dumb questions, often with a confrontational undertone. This is where it gets annoying.

Today, that new kid in the kindergarten came to an obvious conclusion. We need a proper forum! This current $thingy is unberable. And he would even provide the forum. No, wait, he already got a domain… Mind you, the $thingy he uses is a popular “forum frontend for mailing-lists”. I’ll try hard not to mention the name.

So he uses a third-party forum to access a mailing-list, because he can’t handle the mail. Can’t handle the forum either, obviously. And takes the forum front-end’s flaws as evidence a mailing-list is unusable, and we need a forum. This logic strikes me.

Did I mention the list’s topic is about email, quite in-depth, filtering, from an admin‘s perspective?

So he got his shiny new domain. I guess he’ll sit there forever, eye-balling his precious forum, constantly reloading the gazillion threads he started to see if anyone answered his questions. He forgot one thing, though — the knowledgeable folks who actually can answer his questions, and properly maintain the forum.

On to more productive things…