[AccessD] The list

I think a large part of the problem here is that lists and forums are fundamentally different.  We 
came from, started in a different day.  Email was king, the web was often accessed over a low speed 
modem.  Nowadays email is despised and the web is king and "Google is my friend".

I keep pointing folks to this list but people have to sign up for email.  We are all (myself 
included) busy getting *off* email lists.

Email lists provide immediate and often massive gratification, provided sufficient members.  I ask a 
question, within a few minutes or an hour back pour multiple answers.  The answers that come back 
tend to be thoughtful and relevant because the members of this list know more about Access than most 
people out there.

I ask a question in a forum and there are 47 views and 1 or maybe 2 answers, which person votes for 
himself as the best answer, and pisses and moans about down votes.  Check out the much vaunted Stack 
Exchange.  47 viewers too busy to stop by and answer the question, or perhaps simply incapable of 
answering the question.  An entire cadre of uninvolved folks passing by in the night, viewing the 
one answer, moving on to the next Google result to see if there is a better answer.  A handful of 
super guys answer everything.  Yea, I want to be there!  NOT.

I have participated in a handful of forums because I needed their services.  Few have more than a 
small handful of regulars.  Most have exactly a handful, who are very knowledgeable, but rarely are 
they a community.  In the absence of the "one or two super guys" most can be days, weeks or even 
months before any answers come back.  How often do you see an answer to a year old question?  I 
don't hang out in any forum.  None!  I have hung out here since '97.  Why is that?

Like it or not, this and our other lists are just different from the forums.  And if we turned 
ourselves into YAF (yet another forum) we would be just that, YAF.  How many forums names were 
thrown out there which professed to answer Access questions.  Are there insufficient forums out 
there professing to answer Access (and any other) question?  How many skills does Stack Exchange 
cover?  Hundreds?  Thousands?  It gives me a warm fuzzy just thinking about it.

;)

If we truly want to "be relevant" we need to do active recruitment.  Understand though that Access 
is no longer a dev platform so we are going to recruit the "power users" asking how to (insert your 
power user question here).  Then we have to answer that same question over and over.  Or point them 
back out to Google to the forums where the answer has already been provided a bajillion times.

I do my dev in C# now.  I have no interest in answering Access power user questions over and over 
and over...  Fire up a conversation on Access classes, wrapping objects in class wrappers and 
sinking and raising events... now I'm listening.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it

On 9/17/2012 3:02 PM, Arthur Fuller wrote:
> I think that I'm with Hans-Christian on this topic, which is to say, we
> might invigorate the site by adding more lists, each devoted to a
> programming language, and perhaps more narrowly, a language oriented
> towards databases.