I think it would be very beneficial to your users to have professional (meaning paid) moderators for the different catagories in your forum. I see a lot of questions going unanswered, like my last four post. A user manual for Links would also be very helpful.

Craig
Internet Business Tools

Addressing problems in the forums is not up to Moderators. If you do not receive replies in the Threads you create within a timely manner (like a day or so), then post a reply in your Thread to bring the Thread to the top of the Forum. Sometimes Threads get lost in the shuffle and also it does take time for people to respond to Threads.

I saw only two of your questions that contained no replies.

Discussions of creating a manual have gone in the Links 2.0 Forums for quite awhile. But you might want to send a direct message to Gossamer Threads and suggest this.

Regards,

Eliot Lee

Don't know why it is NOT up to a moderator. It seems to me that most of the other forums have one. Anyway, you are (in all reality) the moderator, and a dam good one. So Gossamer-Threads ought compensate you (very fairly) for all your effort. That's my statement & I'm sticking to it...:)

Also, I have emailed 'Virginia Lo' <pretty name> about a User Manual, but she did not get back to me with any release dates, YET...;)

Have a Grate 1,
Craig

Craig
Internet Business Tools

craigibt,

The GT forums are realtively unique in that they are self-moderting. There is a good mix of users from Advanced/Very Experienced to Beginners and in the general spirit of the community of the forums we all help each other out.

One of the things that can help to make a difference to the number of replies you get, is to give a good deal of detail in your initial question. Something like this isn't really very helpful, e.g.;

Forum: Links/Links SQL
Subject: Not Working
Message: The link at the bottom of my category pages produces and error, what could it be?

The forums display a list of "Subject's" first, so a good comprehesive shortened version of the problem can get attention from those people who may have already encountered it, e.g.;

Forum: Links/Links SQL
Subject: Submit a Site link produces 500 Server Error

This immediatly tells the more experienced user that there may be something wrong with the add.cgi script or other files/scripts related to it, and so its worth taking a look to see if they can help.

Also, if the server error details are posted with the message it can show specific lines of the script that may have problems, and/or realtive paths to files and scripts on the server and help to track down where potential file permission problems may exist, etc.

It can take a while to get the 'feel' for the GT forums especially if you are new to perl/cgi and you're not sure what some of the problems are you're coming across, but having used many other forums I find these the most friendly and easy to use.

You'll find that in each set of forums there are people like Eliot who have a lot of experience with the applications/scripts and are willing to help others to make the most of them. Also, a lot of problems are recurring because each new person using the scripts can encounter a series of issues that have already been experience by many others taking the same route.

This knowledge base is held in the forums themselves (searching previous posts) and by the people who regularly come along an get actively involved in progressing the use and modification of the software (often more experienced users who have tailored the scripts to do things they want, and which they wish to share with other users).

From my personal experience I like it here, and there's nowhere else like it I've found so far!


All the best
Shaun