How To Waste Time In The Newsgroups

by Troy Sorzano

Published 1999-04-19    Printer-friendly version

Newsgroups were and are Topspeed's "preferred" product support method. Yes, newsgroups do work and the Clarion community has been limping along using them for the last several years. But newsgroups are not efficient.

Think of a newsgroup as a one-to-many relationship: a person can post a quick question that only took two minutes to type up, and many people can and will read that post on the newsgroup. The problem is that no one knows how many people actually read that question or how much time they spent reading.

Just for an example assume that 100 people read that question, taking 20 seconds each. The question that only took two minutes to create has now utilized 33 minutes of the Clarion community's time. Taking it one step farther, what if one or more people respond to that question? How much time is then spent to resolve that two-minute question? The answer is "I don't know," but I do know I have sometimes spent anywhere from five minutes to two hours on some replies.

A newsgroup's inefficiency is that it allows a single resource to utilize multiple resources. This becomes an even bigger issue when a similar question is asked over and over again. How much time is wasted regurgitating the same answers to common questions? If you want to see an example, do a search on Dynamic Pool Limits using DejaNews' power search for the comp.lang.clarion newsgroup. People have been posting the same question over and over and over for years.

As far as I can tell, the first solution to Dynamic Pool Limit errors was posted on April 28, 1996, so there has been a solution on the newsgroup for the last three years. Why are people still asking the same Dynamic Pool Limit question in 1999? A search will show that the most recent question posted asking about pool limits was on January 4, 1999. There have been about 500 messages on comp.lang.clarion about this one error since the first solution was posted. The amount of time that has been spent on the Dynamic Pool Limit problem is mind-boggling. And the sad part is that there has been a posted solution for almost as long as the question has been asked.

Now some may argue that newsgroups are efficient because they can be searched. That may true for public newsgroups like comp.lang.clarion, but these days most of the Clarion discussion takes place on TopSpeed's own news server (tsnews.clarion.com), which is not picked up by usenet search agents like DejaNews. To search the TopSpeed newsgroups you would need to actually download all twenty thousand plus messages first. Even then, your searches may still run into trouble because you are searching through raw text. For example, try using DejaNews to search the comp.lang.clarion newsgroup for articles on "SQL Anywhere." You'll find a large number of messages that don't contain any information at all on SQL Anywhere, but instead mention it only in the poster's signature block.

I hope you can understand that no matter how cool or neat we think newsgroups are, they are not a very efficient way to share the knowledge of the Clarion community. From a resource perspective, knowledge on a newsgroup is very expensive. Just imagine all the cool cutting-edge stuff someone like Arnor Baldvinsson could be coding if he was not answering dozens of newsgroup questions every day.

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Troy Sorzano is a member of Team Topspeed Internet and a partner at Information Packaging Unlimited where he creates client/server and Internet applications in Clarion. He can be reached via e-mail at troyweb@infopackaging.com.

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Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942