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Hussein Badakhchani's Blog | September 19, 2006   1:25 PM | Comments (9)

I have posted a question on newsgroups erm on the dev2dev newgroups here. To be honest I don't think anyone will reply, even with a generous portion of reward points.

I have always used newsgroups and they have helped me to resolve some pretty tough problems. Apart from being one of the first places to look for help I find applications with healthy newsgroups are often superior to their counterparts.

For as long as I have used WLS its newgroups have been pretty poor. There are lots of repeated questions, few answers. The odd newsgang brat remark although, thankfully, we have far fewer of these than Suns Java forums, probably because there are no prizes on offer.

Newsgroups are to some degree a reflection of the community they serve, ours need some more meaningful participation.

Comments

• I'm going to admit that I tend to live mainly in the ALUI forums, but the point you make about repeated questions is something that nags at me as well. Like you I see the same questions asked - over and over - I'd love to see these captured and exposed through updated online docs (assuming people are reading those...ahem - you _are_ reading those, right? :). The questions that are asked are often very good / legit and should (IMO) be captured and then either thrown into "scenarios" or FAQ-type areas in the docs at a minimum. How do I do X? In what situations do I do Y? I blew up Z and now it's my job if I don't fix it - what do I do? I can't believe I'm goign to say this as I'm not entirely onboard with "2.0," but possibly user-group Wikis so we can publish "how-to's" related to the IDK, etc.? Community involvement in online document updates may seem a bit...well...overly hopeful... but I do think that if I had the opportunity do document things I'd probably do it there so we could all benefit as opposed to me putting into in text file and then emailing it to myself so there's absolutely no way I can find it later :) Yeah - I'm being self-serving along the way again ;)

  Posted by: ewwhitley on September 19, 2006 at 5:23 PM

• I pretty much agree with everything you posted here and on the newsgroup. There must be a better way to exploit the newsgroups than a simple search mechnaism, most popular threads or scoring responses. With respect to repeated questions why not identify them and make genuine support cases out of them. How-to's and FAQs if well written are tried and tested information resources it would be great if they could be kept uptodate.

  The JBoss forums are in my experience a lot more responsive than BEAs, I don't think this is all down to JBoss users not wishing to pay for support but rather I think it's because there are core individuals on the JBoss teams answering some of the questions.

  Posted by: hoos on September 20, 2006 at 7:42 AM

• Thanks for the feedback to my question hoos (+ ewwhitley), and for posting the question in the newsgroups too - silly of me not to do so. I've pointed folk here from my original blog post too.

  Posted by: jonmountjoy on September 20, 2006 at 8:14 AM

• One relatively minor change that I'd like to see are some formatting changes. There is a lot of wasted white space in the newsgroup displays. It's possible we could make more efficient use of the tool if the display was more efficient. I suppose if the interface was reworked to be Ajax-based, we could gain other efficiencies, and that wouldn't hurt for the "gee-whiz" factor to draw in readers/writers.

  Posted by: dkarr on September 21, 2006 at 1:17 PM

• Hoos: Completely agree, which is why I actively encourage my (Workshop) team to participate in the newsgroups. They are a huge help to folks. You mentioned that prizes are offered on other companies newsgroups. Do you think something like a bounty on Reward Points?

  Posted by: wgroth2 on October 2, 2006 at 10:34 PM

• Hello Bill,

  I think prizes are a double edged sword. While they may act as an insentive to post more answers a quick scan of Suns Java forums (which I know used to offer prizes and I think still does) reveals gangs posting poor questions which other gang members answer or individuals providing really poor answers to every question. Fortunately BEA newsgroups do not suffer from this problem and I think the lack of prizes acts as a deterrent. Mind you if I could cash in my reward points I would be rich :).

  I was thinking about the newsgroups again last night (sad but true) the only new thing I could think of to bolster their use was to take my camcorda down to BEA world and ask developers to explain on camera why they do or don't use them. I was planning to offer to add all the participants to my user whatch list assuming they had an existing account with dev2dev or were prepared to create one. I would then make the responses available over the web and give priorty to answering posts from the participants which I would be "watching". If nothing else it would serve as a community building exercise.

  Posted by: hoos on October 3, 2006 at 3:42 AM

• Hey hoos, what ever happened to that London Weblogic Meetup you were planning? There's quite a few people here who would love to see your 9.2 build proces demo. :-)

  Posted by: simonvc on October 18, 2006 at 4:24 AM

• I can't hook up next week but the week after should be fine. As I rememebr the consensus was that Friday is off limits and early in the week is a bad idea, so I suggest Thursday 26th October at Renaissance Chancery Court London only five stars will do! I'll try and convince BEA that they should help pay the outrageous bill I plan to generate as part of the build process but in case they don't agree it would help if you confirm expected numbers so that I can arrange a loan from the bank...

  If anyone else reading this entry is interested in WLS environment provisioning and proving and wants to come along get in touch with me a.s.a.p.

  Posted by: hoos on October 18, 2006 at 5:03 PM

• i am facing the problem with portal server . when i ran the server , server is not running. after certain step the server stoped.Not coming to Running Mode message. Srujan

  Posted by: srujankumarm on August 8, 2007 at 10:32 PM