Locking down the group
Jeff Nichols
After months of consideration and increasing annoyance, I've decided
to lock down the group. I'll keep it online as an archive, but
posting has been disabled.
http://wateree.net/blog/2010/02/winter-cleaning/
http://wateree.net/syncman/support/
As mentioned in the blog post, there are many reasons, but one of the
primary is spam. For whatever reason, Google doesn't use their
awesome spam filtering powers for groups. As the group started to get
more and more spam, I decided to turn on moderation for new members.
I found the controls for moderating posts to be very tedious and
painful, which then led to me delaying my administrative tasks... days
or weeks would go by before I moderated, allowed and answered
perfectly acceptable questions. As many of you know, I'm *usually*
much better about responding to email sent directly to me.
Another factor to consider was the number of members who didn't elect
to receive emails from the group. I can't blame them, I've done it
myself in other groups, but this caused me to think that sometimes I
was just answering to the void. I feel that I'm much more motivated
to answer questions when I know for sure that the asker is going to
receive my response.
The third main factor is efficiency. One of the 'classical' reasons
for using a group is that people search for answers first and only ask
if they don't find an answer. In practice I feel that very few people
actually do this. I have answered the same questions many times, and
I almost always wrote new answers because I felt bad about directing
people to conversations that were slightly different than what they
were asking.
All of these factors have led me to believe that Syncman is simply not
the kind of product that attracts or benefits from a "community". At
the moment I believe that the best means of support (for Syncman) are
a well groomed FAQ that answers common questions in a general way, and
great email support for specific questions. So that's what I'm gonna
try. For those that have stuck around and will receive this email, I
appreciate your participation and I hope you can understand my
position. If you have any questions or comments, be sure to let me
know... just not here. ;-)
Jeff
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Jeff Nichols
Wateree Software
http://wateree.net/