I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, but some forums at which I spend time allow private message from one member to another. Usually such messages that I have received were tasteful and appropriate for private communication, as opposed to the public threads, but obviously, that might not always be the case.

Perhaps such a functionality could be included in the Social Networking part of LQ. Obviously one would want the option of refusing such messages, either altogether or by individual user. The most likely problem seems to me to be the possibility of a person directing all his questions via private messaging. I personally would not hesitate to recommend that the sender should present his question on the public forums if that seemed a more appropriate venue.

I do note that is is possible to send email, but if other people are like me, they only check that occasionally.

well there is private messaging at LQ, provided as a feature to contributing members. it was a decision taken a while ago to move towards that to encourage donations, as private messaging in itself is not a massively useful tool in LQ's general life. I have to say i'm glad it's not available to all... i have enough people emailing me directly aobut problems let alone being able to PM me too.

Let me explain the main impetus behind PM's only being enabled for contributing members. LQ's main goal is to provide a helpful and friendly resource to the Linux community and to be a sort of archive of knowledge to draw on. Due to the nature of private messages, they go against that goal in a lot of ways. Instead of posting a question, where everyone can benefit from it, people would seek answers via PM's. The end result would be less knowledge for all. I agree that it would be interesting to have them enabled from the social perspective, but I think at this time the cons outweigh the pros. Thanks for the feedback and feel free to continue discussing the issue.

--jeremy

With due respect, I find this to be shallow thinking.

I'd like to use this feature to help someone.

Some people (noobs) are posting reviews of different distro's and I've found that a lot of their 'cons' are commonly known problems that I could help out with. Since I can't send them a PM though, I can't help.

Bad.

Good

If a newbie has a very common complaint about a distro, it is better to use a public forum. A PM can only help one person at a time, this means that you will change perception in one person out of, say, ten thousand. By putting the "fix" on a public forum, you have the most opportunity to help the full ten thousand.

Additionally, if you help via a PM and get to the end of your knowledge and the problem still isn't fixed, your response will be to post the question on the forums.

Really, overall the forums are the most efficient and 'best' way to help people. If you really need to use PMs you can always suggest that someone goes offline and opens a client but then, of course, we cannot be responsible for your answers.

Sure you can!!!--just post a reply. Or--in the "distro reviews" area, post your own review.

The presumption here is that--if someone wants help--they post a request for help. When they do that, everyone deserves to see the answer.

Keep in mind that many people don't want help.

Sometimes I could use private messaging to talk about something that is outide of this forum's boundaries, or completely off-topic, but I admit that it's a luxury, and, in this world, you usually have to pay for luxuries, so I guess I will just have to keep some thoughts to myself. But again, it doesn't bother me too much.

Also, with private messages, it's pretty hard to force people to post on the forums when they should do so, instead of PMing each other.

I answer a lot of questions in several remote control forums that support private messages. I really wish those forums didn't support private messages. Almost all the private messages I get are ordinary questions that should have been asked in the forum. People seem to think sending a private message to an expert is a better way to get attention than asking in a forum.

I don't expect to get a reputation as an expert here. I'm only answering easy questions and some of those not very well (meanwhile I'm asking some beginner questions myself). But if some of the real experts here are among those that would like to have private messaging available to ordinary users, I can suggest they would regret it if they had it.

I think I have used private messages around 10 times since I got it. If I need to contact a member I use email, if I really wanted to give instant support I'd use a chat client. A lot of us work in IT support and after a hard day of giving almost instant support, the last thing we want to do is to do it again on our own time

The forums move fast enough not to need support via PM, IMO.

I just thought to myself that maybe forums are more about spreading the knowledge among as big audience as possible, rather than about helping to "a" person. So I think it's all more about learning than helping, and if you're "hiding" knowledge by using any private communication channels, you're... not contributing to the idea - yes, that's how I'd describe it.

Another thought: if you're giving someone a solution to something, you're narrowing it all down to your point of view. That's why we should share the knowledge instead of giving solutions. We should introduce solutions when there's no time, but no solution is better than knowledge.

signed, k


P.S.
Sharing the knowledge is not only true about internet forums, as you can see in this movie...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BOCf...eature=related

With regards to making the knowledge available to everyone, I think that it is incorrect to say that because you've shared your knowledge with a singular person that therefore it will not be available to everyone. In fact, I would be as bold as to suggest that it can help spread information. You never know what the person you've helped is going to do with that knowledge. Also along this line of thinking, I believe that there really isn't going to be too many questions asked that haven't been answered somewhere already. I feel that if you see someone who has a problem you should be able to go to them to help.

Which brings me to this point: While I understand what some of you have been saying about some people not actually wanting help, I think it is also fair to say (and it was in my case) that a lot of n00bs take some of their problems with their OS as a given. They see a problem, for example, firefox randomly dies and they just think, "Agh, annoying. Oh well, I'll just have to try and live with it - because for all my n00bish searching and my n00bish questions I couldn't find the answer.". And little do they know that someone else has noticed their problem and can straight away determine that their Firefox issue (for example) is a flash player problem. But because they have no way of getting in contact with the person via PM (not many give their email out on a forum) they can't give them a fix.

As stated above, I don't believe that telling one person a solution (or pointing them in the right direction) can be labeled as 'not sharing the love'. It is 'sharing the love' , mabey not in the most efficient way for every human to see straight away (like a forum) - but information has been shared and will - in all likeliness - be shared on to another person.

Obviously PM's can be abused. But lets be realistic, so can everything - forums included. I personally feel that PM's would be a useful feature to help reach people - noobs especially - with problems that they either 1) may not know is a problem or 2) may not be able to articulate their problem effectively enough to be helped.

socceroos- Most times, a newbie will post about a problem in the forum- easy- just reply. How do you know they have a problem that they don't know they have?

Email is all we need- PMs are not checked just as email is not checked. PMs don't bring any added functionality: it's just a message from one user to another- just like email is.

If you are responding to a question, if you respond in a public way that is indexed by search engines, others can find the answer in the future.

TG

Uh, I don't think you read my post properly.

This is true, the vast majority of the questions have already been asked. So what's wrong with just saying "if you search for the following you will find the question has been dealt with and it should give you enough to go on".

Which is all well and good, but what if (to use your example and expand on it) it's not a Flash problem and you can't help further? The great thing about a forum is that once you've reached the limits of your knowledge you can step back and let someone else take over. It also means that you don't get fed up because you have become someone's personal Linux technician. Also, the global nature of the boards means that when you are awake and have a free hour, the needy person may be asleep and vice versa. Do you think it's fair that someone should have to lose sleep because someone else thinks their needs come first?

Yes, it is a way of sharing the love, but doing it in a one to one manner means that you can only share it one person at a time. And let's say they use your ideas on a Linux blog, wouldn't you want some credit?

Again, if you do this on a one to one basis, how easy will it be for them to articulate their problems? If, say, someone who's primary language is Chinese comes here we can see from their profile that they use English as a second language and adjust accordingly. Chinese members (and Chinese speaking members) can then step in not in English to try to elicit more information. And yes, I know that Chinese is not called Chinese when you talk about the language.

The whole point is that IM is an efficient tool if you know the person and know what their problem is and their environment. For strangers, forums are far more efficient because we have, theoretically, no downtime and can keep going as long as that person can. It also means that when they log off, the information is still here - both for the original poster and for anyone else with the same problem. It also, in theory, means you don't have to answer the same question over and over again. In theory.

I guess the question is, how do you contact someone who doesn't have an email address listed?


True.

I see your point. I personally couldn't give a stuff if someone has used my knowledge and made it popular through their own blog post - that would be great. But I can see why in some cases this could be a problem.

I guess I was thinking more of someone like my self who didn't have the computing expertise to be able to effectively communicate what your problem is. I guess an example is someone saying, "My computers running really slow, it won't load things." when really the problem is that their using dial-up to access a web 2.0 service.


I have to agree with that. I guess the problem I'm trying to address comes to fruition when someone is given a bad impression of their OS because of a problem that they just think is 'built-in' and as such don't realise that they can get it fixed. They don't ask a question for this reason (or because of fear of flaming, n00b status, lack of time, privacy issues - whatever the human issue is).

I personally feel that having PM would add another layer of help. With PM it would then be possible for me to help 'said person' even though they haven't posted, haven't given their email address to the bots and haven't the knowledge to help themselves, or get help, with their problem.

I guess, for my opinion to be changed, I need to know that the negatives of adding this functionality will outweigh the positives.