Funny you should mention this, I no longer look at many of the Borland for
this very reason. I used to skim all Delphi & IB forums, until it just
started taking 3 - 4 hours a day!

I was thinking how we could still encourage support and have a positive
impact for newbie's.

It is so important to offer a good support forum for people who are just
coming to IB for he first time, a few RTFM's is often enough to put people
off, but it seems required for the dozens of Q's "which is better... how do
I.....", which make up much of the traffic. Most of these kind of posts
have little or no qualifying information at all.

I love answering questions with answers or suggestions, but replying with
"what OS / version / number of clients / ......", just fluffs up the
forums.

I thought of two tier groups, but this seems elite-ist (sp), it would work
on a "anyone post" group and an "invite only" group. People who answer the
anyone post group are invited onto the "invite only". The meatiness of the
questions and answers on the "invite only" group may make searching archives
easier.

I had other thoughts about how to get people to search before the ask,
without having to be too forceful, this would really need a lot of
moderation and marking message threads as stopped with a reply "Have you
searched these sources? list of sources".

Don't get me wrong, the forum is way off from grinding to a halt, but
already I find myself block selecting 30 or so messages and marking them as
read, possibly missing a Q that I could answer and add some value.

just my 2c's.

JAC.

""csswa"" <csswa@...> wrote in message
news:a8720f+6lct@......

> ... which may require IB-support to split in two to better handle the=20
> traffic? Sometimes I wonder how some of the regulars here (Ann,=20
> Claudio and Helen spring to mind immediately) manage to provide this=20
> constant flow of online support and still get the food-on-the-table=20
> work done. As traffic escalates, this may become more of an issue,=20
> especially if the experienced members get to the point where they no=20
> longer have time to skim all posts and reply to those of interest.=20=20
> Growth itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but poorly managed=20
> growth is.