How many of you have experienced this - where a member asks a specific question, gets the answer within a post or two.. then replies asking (again) for information that's already within the thread. I'm not talking about a post being missed because there are so many replies.. but in instances where there have only been.. say two... responses with the full answer supplied (including the answer to the following question) I find it difficult to curb sarcasm at this point and have to stay away from the thread... how do you deal with it?
I am with you on this. I would seriously have to curb my sarcasm and bite my tongue. However I think the most polite response would be "answer provided in my previous post"
A great topic. Listening, after asking a question is as important as asking a well written question. I've often wondered why, when after I feel like I've told someone something, they don't "get" it, and keep asking. I think it's because repeated answers help a person understand and eventually they want to paraphrase the answer back to us... the only true test of if someone understood teh answer or not. This happens a lot to me where I have to find lots of different ways of saying the same thing over and over again so that the person finally "gets" it. It's like a person doesn't want to hear or "get" that the answer to 2 + 2 is 4 But when you spin it to them as 2 + 1 + 1 = 4 you'll get that Ahhh! moment Yeah it's trying gogo
I know it's not quite the same but i did once have a member pm me and ask a question and i took the time to write a informative reply, but the person never logged in to get the reply.
Why didn't I see this before? I moderate a site that's a little err seedy, I don't dare link it. Lets just say, illegal things are discussed there and its hosted in Russia. The intent of the forum is harm reduction, basically some kid posts a question and 20 old heads tell them in detail with scientific backed research that they're stupid. Its a very effective system to putting a scare into a passer-by, while giving someone that wishes to go forward with their little experimental fun all the information they would need to do it as safely as possible (like, when to have themselves taken to the hospital). Now that I've given you an idea of what goes on there I'll tell you about 20% of the resident "population". We have these idiots that come a long, read all the information, ask a question, are told by about 10 people that what they're planning is a bad idea, just to get a post the next day going into long detail about how they went through with it and ignored all the advice. Nothing pisses me off more than to see someone do that. Just straight up ignore everything they're begin told and push forward. But I guess that's evolution at work. Sometimes we get no reply at all...and I do wonder what happened to the OP. No doubt a lot of them aren't around anymore to post. Anyway, yea its frustrating...but even more so when lives are really on the line. Also, while everyone has to be a bit of an idiot to take part in the things discussed on that forum I personally see a big difference between groups on that forum. You have this one group that super careful, going to all sorts of crazy lengths to partake safely, you have "in-betweeners" that are as careful as possible within their means (meaning, they aren't as educated or don't have access to tools the higher tier members to), then you have this lower class that's just straight up on the lower end of the IQ scale. That lower class is constantly there to provide a good laugh and be a constant reminder to the rest of the people that visit on what can happen if you don't follow the advice you're given. We deal with everything, from things that have been in use for thousands of years to bleeding edge stuff that's barely been researched. Its a constant work in progress to provide accurate advice, we spend a lot of time on this stuff in the hope that it will save lives. To just have someone show up, ask questions, ignore advice, and possibly die on us...it's all very disheartening. We always think; What more could we have done? Why didn't we get through to that guy? But the days roll on, and new faces show up, and those incidents are mostly forgotten.
This topic is very close to my heart but it's not members I generally have this issue with, it's the other admins on one particular board. It's their board but I do all the technical work. They know what they want and will rarely accept any technical reasons of why it can't be done that way. The result is loads of unnecessarily long threads where I've rehashed my replies to the point where even I can't stand to read them. Generally my replies are ignored until they get the reply they want to hear or I just give up and stop posting in that thread. Grrrrr...
Nothing could be done. If you wish to run a forum and like to have new members, you have to live with it.
Although this could be irritating if a member specifically doesn't take any notice of a solution you posted to their question. Another way to look at it, well the way I do is if anyone else has a related issue then the solution is posted and you can always direct them to the answer, solution so to speak you previously posted. Any helpful response to a problem I find can be viewed as helping many others, even in the future if directly at the time of posting the user chose to ignore your response.
You do realize that has only piqued our interest and whetted our appetites? Azhria, some people just have poor memories.
I participate in many forums and it happens to me often. Even after specifically mentioning what to do in more than one reply posts, some still repeat the question like please tell me what to do, I am stuck. I mostly quote the repeated answers in previous posts.
What I find more annoying is members second guessing the reason for the question and discussing the reason. and then posting replies that others have already posted 'coz they didn't bother to read the thread. Or deciding the OP was looking for something else and make a post completely unrelated to the question.
Alright, I'll go a bit further if you didn't put two and two together: Its a forum for drug users. I personally moderate the "safe" section of the forum, meaning most of the drugs discussed in my area aren't things one could die from taking too much of. You could go crazy sure, maybe not be the same when you came down, but you aren't going to die. Another one of my "duties" is general health advice, mostly dealing with how to ease yourself through withdraw, setting up a proper "taper" program, what to tell your doctor, why your doctor put you on x, y, or z, OTC medications you can take to ease yourself through the worse parts. I also spend a lot of my time there dealing with people one on one, as in, if they're planning on taking something I'll have them give me a list of every medication they're on or have taken in the last 6 months and at that point I will tell them the risks of mixing those things. A lot of things like anti-depressants can not ever be mixed with certain street drugs or you run the risk of death viaSerotonin Syndrome. I also help out in other sections though, like the one used by the people that inject (we have lots of threads related to how to do that properly). I'm constantly having to stress things like: Don't share needles, don't re-use needles, don't stick needles in places only an idiot would, don't pull blood back into the needle to get the little bit that didn't go in the first time. etc. etc. I was never one to inject in my stupid years, but I did become somewhat of an expert on the subject through working with people that did it every day and via the internet. That forum has such a diverse user base....we have doctors, nurses, lawyers, artist, kids, people that are dependent (legit reason for begin on a medication), people that abuse, thieves, everyone basically...it is the largest forum on the internet dealing with this particular topic. My day might start in a thread discussing nutmeg and end in a thread discussing needle exchanges. I'm there mostly to keep anyone from repeating my mistakes. But at least one user a day is on there doing something idiotic and ignoring advice, I'd say on average I see people ignoring advice at least 5 times a day. As of late (well, last 10 years) we've had a another huge problem because of the internet itself. You see there are these new drugs called "research chemicals" with little use in the human population. Websites in Russia/China and even the states have started selling these things as "legal" alternatives to known drugs. As a result, we've had a flood of users taking these research chemicals, and we've had to piece together information on them. We can never really give a 100% answer on how safe they are to use, but because of our forum, we know a lot more about them than we would otherwise. Thankfully we have a large number of doctors and chemist on our forum to pipe in and let us known about these new RCs. We've actually managed to stay ahead of the curve on them a little, for example, when this new craze of "bath salts" started up about a year ago we had a bunch of them purchased and chemical analyst done on them to figure out what was in them, and once we'd linked this shady product to the RC contained within it we could start informing the user base on what they were consuming. We also do this with certain street drugs because recently there has been an explosion of bunk products on the market begin sold as something else. We keep a list of ecstasy pills for example, and we're constantly having samples sent to chemist to verify whats in each pill. Its hard to stay ahead of the dealers though.. Anyway, if you want to go on google I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding the place. I'm just not going to drop the link because of the forums subject matter. I just wanted to give an example of a place where lives are actually on the line when advice is ignored. As I said, we have doctors on our staff and as a sub-set of our user database. This isn't a place with a bunch of teenagers running around giving each other advice on how to "get off", its run just like a real life needle exchange, clinic, or medical facility. Our primary reason for existing is harm reduction, and I'd say in the many years I've been there we've probably saved at least 1,000 or more lives in that time, we've probably lost 100 at most, and all of those were because the user in question ignored the advice he was given or pushed ahead before anyone could reply. If you have trouble finding the place and are interested in seeing how it is run send me a PM.
