Sometimes I like to give advice by posting in the help section of the forum. Probably it's worth a separate blog entry why I am doing it, because IMHO this is the one thing you shouldn't do if you're going for easy kudos or mass production. Maybe I want to help, maybe I want to keep sharp on my knowledge, or is it only for showing off?! Honestly, I do not know for sure. The explanation I like best is based on something I saw in a signature of some help forum moderator years ago. I hope this translates well into English: "Do not pay back, pay forward!", meaning if you get helped, return the favour by helping not the same person, but the next one in line in need of help. What a cool idea!

Posting an answer to a problem thread in the help sections takes time. You can't fire away a "great, I like it" and be done with it, but you have to understand the problem, check the facts, look up some details, maybe even try something yourself before giving it as advice, and then you have to put it into words that leave not much room of misunderstanding. Most of the time it's an iterative process, too, because you have to verify some details the OTC (original thread creator) didn't mention. Oh, that's another topic worth of a blog entry. Some people just write "my game doesn't work. I need help" without as much as giving a clue about the circumstances. Anyway, what's important here is that answering to a problem thread usually involves some kind of obligation to walk through the solution process over several postings, too, so you have to check back at the forum every now and then.

Which means: helping involves time and implies an obligation.In an ideal world, the problem thread finishes with a "thanks, this or that worked" or at least a "no, that didn't solve my problem, but thanks anyway".Such endings have the advantage that other people reading it know whether something worked, too. People with the same problem can search the forum months later and learn about right (and wrong) ways to solve their problem without starting at point zero again.

Unfortunately, in the real world most threads finish with an advice and the OTC is never heard again. This is not specific to my advices, but a general behaviour. I hate it. Not even the person that gave the advice learns whether his time was well spent.

A short while ago I answered a question about network connectivity problems at the TSR General PC help forum. It was not very Sims-specific, but as the problem description was quite detailed, I offered some advice, including some hints on what the OTC should check. That took me maybe 15 minutes of my life. The OTC never wrote back. This time I got curious. After two weeks or so I used Google to check if the OTC had posted his question somewhere else as well. It turned out he had. Google came up with more than hundred different forums he had asked the same question word by word (copy and paste is cheap) over the course of a week! I checked only a few of those hits, but it seems about a third of the forums had a reply (often with additional questions, too) and the OTC never replied once to any advice giver.

The strange thing was he posted in some German forums, too, but with the english text. Did he expect an answer there? And he posted a few dozen of his identical question each day, several days in a row. That doesn't sound like a spambot either. Why would someone do this? Imagine 100 different forums having this thread, each causing one guy to spend 15 min for an answer, and you come up with 25 hours wasted on helping someone who didn't care to check the replies or comment on them. Lacking feedback shows lacking manners sometimes, I think.

I have a poll for this topic, too.