List of Resources?

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by Eric Bareiss

I have seen a lot of threads that begin "I need help with..." and I have seen a lot of people that are willingly offering help on any given subject. If there are this many people openly looking for help and willing to give help, maybe someone shold do some mediating.

Here's where I see the problem is: Poor Thread Titles.

I generally browse ChiefDelphi.com during quick breaks at work. To facilitate doing this as quickly as possible, I generally only use the Portal, so I can easily see which posts are the latest.

When seeing the portal, I constantly see thread titles like: "Help", "Please Help", "Help pretty, pretty please with sugar on top", "A Few Questions", etc.

Being the helpful guy that I usually am, at first I was clicking on these to see if I could help. Then, I find out the person wants help on animation, or the chairman's award entry, or something else totally off my area of expertise.

So, what has happened in the mean time? I have just stopped looking at threads like this. I have maybe one or two minutes to see what's up, which means if I click on a thread like that and waste that time, I've pretty much shot my time, which means I didn't answer a question that maybe I could have answered.

So...

- Be SPECIFIC with your thread titles. Do you want help with rendering? Then title your thread "Help with rendering", not "Help". Also, if you want help finding gears, title your thread "Help Finding Gears", not just "gears", because "gears" could mean 50 different things.

- Do NOT be afraid to sound redundant. For instance, a thread titled "Help" on the Chairman's Award forum may make some sence if you're browsing the Chairman's Award forum, but for those of us that use the portal, "Help" is completely ambiguous.

- Once you've gotten sufficient help and fixed the problem, make a post stating so. This way, a lot of people won't waste their time formulating a great solution to a problem that you have already solved.


For the most part, people have been doing a good job. However, if we can fix that last little bit, it would help out a great deal.

Now then, I'm looking forward to these forums becoming a more helpful place.