There is no doubt @bar is a very busy man even if all he did was answer posts on this forum all day and I know he does much more than that. Who else is just as familiar with the software, hardware and machine capabilities as he is?
Maybe we can spread the help a little to lighten his load. I default to asking him directly but there are plenty that have a very reliable and vast knowledge of the Maslow. Many answer or are involved in just about every post. This is an amazing forum with great people and talented smart people.
If we have a software question, who are others we can call out directly for an individual question? Likewise for hardware?
I think that’s the beauty of the forums. When you have a question, you never know who is busy or who is knowledgeable about the piece of code or hardware in question. By posting your question to the forums, you almost always get a quick response and the rest of the community gets the benefit of the response.
The most knowledgeable and experienced folks are frequenters of these forums. Posting in the forums is the fastest way to get to all the experts.
This is a community and all the conversations that take place here are for the benefit of everyone in the community… not that you can’t PM someone for a private conversation, but technical challenges (and their solutions) are shared by everyone here.
Understood and I agree with both of you. I guess this was a silly topic since I got a little caught up with calling out someone specifically in a post. My thought was I don’t expect every user to read every thread. So if I have a topic going on about “size of screw thread” but quickly want to ask something related to software, I could call a few people out using @ that are familiar with software (instead of always defaulting to one person) who otherwise might not have ever seen that thread.
Oddly (and believe me, this is odd for an open forum) most users read every thread! This truly is a unique community you’re a part of.
Your topics have an average of 200 views and over a dozen replies; you’re definitely making high-quality posts and reaching the right people.
I think the best practice is to default to all people, and not call anyone out unless you’re certain only that person can answer the question. That’s accomplished by simply posting a new topic in the proper category.
Also, I’m not sure if you’re referring to asking a software question in a topic about screw threads, but it’s usually bad practice to conflate issues in a single topic. A software question belongs in one of the software categories and a screw thread question belongs in one of the hardware categories. That’s a forum thing; not specific to the Maslow community!
I can believe that. I have alerts on every category! I at least see and read every new thread and spend more time reading than I probably should.
I was looking more for a short list of people that are heavily involved in the software and would know most software questions. Based on the massive new frame design thread, I gathered who knew the most about best recommended dimensions and hardware set up. Software changes kind of happen in the background.
The community is great. I’ll just defer to everyone.
That would be the one. Kibo knew whenever someone referred to him, simply by doing a grep (Unix search) on the entire Usenet feed. It wasn’t a sophisticated “hack”, but he was the first to think of it. Usenet was small enough that you could do things like that those days.
Nah. We were all perfectly civil to each other, the rules of engagement were fully agreed to, and we never had to deal with clueless new users who didn’t understand those rules.
@Jayster, have I adequately derailed your thread with a pointless tangent? Sorry, about that, though it’s been a fun trip down memory lane.
Memories from the days Usenet was fun, interesting, and not 90%+ binaries.
We had a partial Usenet feed from Sprint, skipped the binaries because of bandwidth (full T1 cost us around $4K/mo iirc) but provided links to alternate sources. Got the usual “censorship” screamers. Even that saturated our 10M Ethernet (remember those?) after a couple years, moved from hubs to 100M switches and two parallel lans.
Anything left of Usenet? Haven’t even checked for a few years
@Jayster It does not always need experts. Sometime a user remembering a similar question in another post and sharing the link is enough.
I see drawback in addressing individuals as follows:
With a product under development, not all experts have the same opinion on some subjects. (they still stay friends ) You benefit from getting feedback from various sides.
We cover the timezones from New Zealand (UTC +12) to Alaska (UTC -10). Depending on when you ask, you might need to wait for one specific expert to get out of bed or back from work. By asking open, you can catch the sleepless, the early birds and the lunchtimers.
