30 March 2009

Newsgroup Posting

Fellow MVP Mariano Gomez has posted about how he answers questions in the GP Newsgroup. My process is a little different from Mariano's so I thought that I would give it a minute here to highlight the different ways we work.

Unlike Mariano, I almost never visit the newsgroup site. I have an RSS feed setup via Google Groups that shows Newsgroup in my RSS reader. As I'm reading other items I get the newsgroup posts at the same time and I can reply using Google Groups as well.

Like Mariano, if the answer is quick, I'll usually hop on and post an answer. If it's more involved or if I can't answer it because I'm traveling or reading the question on my phone, I'll star it and come back to it later.

The beauty of the newsgroup is that you have lots of options to participate. No one way is right but all of them can help someone out of a jam and that's really why we do it.