how-to block ads
|
lev
Napoleon is always right
Premium,Ex-mod 2002-08
join:2001-05-30
Chicago, IL
clubs: 
 ·AT&T Midwest
| reply to jsinaiko
Re: When to refer to the AT&T Direct forum, and how
Well...
I started because I wanted to keep the guy before me from burning out. I just wanted to help make things better for broadband users in my area.
This was obviously the forum on the site that was the most important to me. I certainly had different goals and intentions for it than the typical forum on the site.
You have to honor and respect the fact that this site belongs to someone else, and this forum exists at his whim, and that of the people to whom he delegates.
Is it a bloody mess? No. Did it take some wind out of my sails? Sure.
Is this forum still important? Does it have value? Yes, I think so. I'll be here using it, and helping out with answers.
Still, I'm glad to have the responsibility coming off my shoulder. I'm sure my conduct here will be held to a higher standard than the average user, but I might just get to enjoy telling some idiot to piss off every now and then in an IM.  | |
jsinaiko
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Chicago, IL
·AT&T Midwest
| Hey - I got a few of them there IMs! Doh!
You've been great - and I agree with your points - it is an important forum, especially because, along with Comcrap, AT&T is the main ISP in our neck of the woods. Email aside, the service has been pretty steady for a long time, but that doesn't mean trouble-free or perfect.
Still plenty of discuss.
--
Illegitimati non carborundum
| |
Old_Grouch
Don't just sit there silly DO something
Premium
join:2004-05-26
Greenwood, IN
clubs:
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to lev
said by lev  :... but I might just get to enjoy telling some idiot to piss off every now and then in an IM. Ooops, guess that means I need to check my mail more often.
Go ahead....if I don't think I deserve it at the time, I'll at least know that I deserve it for past deeds. 
And, by the way, anyone who has not referred someone to the Direct forum too quickly in the past is welcome to assert the claim so the rest of can call BS!
--
At Team Discovery we know how to get more outta that danged 'puter of yours!
If you paid taxes it's a rebate. If you didn't, it's welfare. | |
whymeintrouble
Premium
join:2001-06-20
Woodridge, IL
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to lev
said by lev :..... but I might just get to enjoy telling some idiot to piss off every now and then in an IM. feel free to IM me anytime
--
no one is listening | |
RadioDoc
58ef2c0
Premium,ExMod 2000-03
join:2000-05-11
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to lev
Honor and respect is a two-way street. At this site it has become decidedly one-way, and that way is not toward the members. I tried to change that long ago and obviously was not successful.
The cow tried to help me years ago when I had three plates full of life to handle but was also unsuccessful due to forces outside his control. I really appreciated that and we're still friends to this day.
As for the topic, there are reasons why the Direct forum was a bad idea and now you are seeing the result. It should have been a "moved to" arrangement from day one where moderators moved threads which needed expert, inside help to resolve. Because it is now the first stop for the majority the regular forums are mostly dead as is the community they fostered.
So yes, please post here first. Maybe someone will be able to revive the Funhouse.
--
Toolmaster of La Grange. | |
RonG
Premium
join:2005-08-03
Schaumburg, IL
| Ok, so I'm kinda confused. I'll say that I don't spend as much time around here as I should, so things may have changed without me noticing. But, I thought that you couldn't post to the Direct area without permission from the moderators. It seems that that would only make sense, to protect that valuable resource. It sounds like, now, anybody who wants to can post to the Direct forum? That would seem to be kind of a bad idea. I thought the idea was to come to the general forums first, and get the help of the folks who wander around there, and only go to the Direct forum when it's outside what the regular forums can handle. If that's not how it is, could somebody explain why it got changed, and if there's a way to consider going back to that? Like I said, we've got a valuable resource in the Direct forum, and the members at-large should try to protect that. | |
RonG
Premium
join:2005-08-03
Schaumburg, IL
| An additional thought. I started a thread yesterday about high latency on my DSL links. There's not much of anything in the "regular" forum about it, and I haven't gotten any responses so far. However, if you go to the Direct forum, there are MANY entries about high latency. Wouldn't it make more sense to have these threads start in the regular forum, where everyone could benefit from the answers (because you can't see what's going on in the Direct forum). The moderators, then, might be able to kind of "aggregate" the problems and send one request to the Direct Forum rather than having everyone dump their questions in there. For example, I can see through a visual traceroute that a number of SBC routers are injecting a high amount of latency into the circuit. I can identify them, although they're probably part of a group. That's a problem that's probably affecting a lot of users. We don't ALL need to put an entry into the Direct Forum for that. The mods might be able to see something like that, or the members could point it out. Seems like a "team approach" might make the whole forum work better. Like I said in my earlier post, tho, I'm probably missing something. | |
lev
Napoleon is always right
Premium,Ex-mod 2002-08
join:2001-05-30
Chicago, IL
clubs:
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to RonG
Ron,
It makes sense to do it that way, but the software here didn't ever support it. The only way it would have was by a "move" arrangement that Radiodoc mentioned earlier. No, we just told people to wait to post there until they heard it was okay from a "senior" member of the forum. That worked well for a while.
One of the concerns that Justin has was the safety and security of the people who posted their personal information in these messages. For a moderator to move such a message, we would have also had to have seen the contents. Justin decided that only paid staff should be able to see the contents of these posts. | |
RonG
Premium
join:2005-08-03
Schaumburg, IL
| I thought that that might be a good way to go because you could (1) lock the Direct forum so that only mods could post to it (perhaps only posting to your own post), or (2) you let anyone post to it like now, but unless it has some sort of "mod seal of approval" the techs there could feel free to ignore it until everything else was taken care of. Maybe an emoticon that only the mods can use. In that way, the forum members would quickly see the benefit of waiting until they get the ok.
I understand the privacy concerns. Perhaps that could be handled by not posting member specific information until it's been moved to the Direct forum, and then only have the mods there be able to see the data. So, a mod in the regular forums could move the item, and once it's there, the techs could request whatever information they needed, and only they and the Direct mod would be able to see it. | |
Old_Grouch
Don't just sit there silly DO something
Premium
join:2004-05-26
Greenwood, IN
clubs:
·AT&T Midwest
| I'm not sure I have a preference for what process exists, the folks in the Direct forum are their own worst enemies because they are so damn good compared to the support you can find elsewhere.
Venom having been spat, one problem with the idea of not posting personal data until one of the direct folks takes ownership is that it could slow the process versus today. Today, they use the responded or unresponded flag as a clue about which posts need first-time attention. If clear information (no giggling allowed) is in the message, they can do some basic fact finding before going to the user.
There have been times that one of the Direct folks will notice a trend in response times or outages and aggregate posts...it helps them as well to be able to see a circle around the problem and it stops them from looking at 23 individual cases of trouble until they bump into a common area.
And, there have been folks here who have spotted trends or patterns and alerted the Direct folks and other users to them so everyone could watch. If lev isn't looking, I'd say he was pretty good at that 
On an active board with a fair amount of quality participation, requiring a public post to lighten the demand on a shared resource makes sense. Haven't seen any data but the Funhouse seems to have lost some measure of of the active and quality components.
DON'T stop writing though. I think this is a good discussion and maybe it points out that it could be time for a shift...we just don't have a clear image of what the shift should be.
If at&t is taking a break in augmenting the collective, it could be nearing time to look at the separations. Instead of geography, maybe lump ADSL in one forum for them and VDSL (U-verse) in another. Heck, we could even put the ... WHY CAN'T I GET IT posts in their own since they are asking a question that few (if any) people here can answer with certainty.
Just stirring the pot. Now, someone add salt.
--
At Team Discovery we know how to get more outta that danged 'puter of yours!
If you paid taxes it's a rebate. If you didn't, it's welfare. | |
RonG
Premium
join:2005-08-03
Schaumburg, IL
| Well, you're right, it does all kind of start with an active community. If there has been a dropoff in activity here, you get into questions of "why?" and how to correct the problem. I haven't been around much recently, but I'll take a shot. Maybe activity has dropped off here somewhat because people are going directly to the Direct forums. If you believe that (and there's no reason to, I guess), then if you limit access to the Direct forums, you may get better activity here. The Funhouse is kind of unique in that you have access to real honest to goodness company tech guys. That's a great resource, but like I said earlier, I think it'd be wise to protect that resource, lest they get P'O'd at people wasting their time and go to greener pastures.
So, let's walk through this for a minute. Let's say you have the mods; they're there to act as gurus and/or provide some semblence of courtesy and traffic management in the forums. Then you have regular visitors who act as "gurus" themselves but don't have mod powers. The first thing to figure out is what these folks would need to potentially solve a problem without having any or a lot of personal data on the open forum. You put that up in a pinned post; I haven't looked recently, but I think you guys might have already done that at some point. So, the open forum has the opportunity to offer some solutions, like, "have you plugged in your modem lately?", or "you can fix that by sprinkling salt on your keyboard". They'd also take on things like "I'm paying for 6 Mb, and only getting 5.999. What a ripoff!". Let's say, then, as a guideline, you can never go to the Direct Forum until you've had some sort of response on the open forum. That implies that the Direct Forum is off limits for "new topics" except from the mods on the open forum. Once there, the user, the Direct mods, and the techs would have the ability to respond to those posts, but only their own, as it's done now. Now, how to get the post over to Direct? Isn't there something the mods can do now to move a post that's in the wrong forum? Maybe we could just use that. In the way of traffic direction, between the open mods and the direct mods, they could sort of take the lead in noticing trends and trying to avoid having the techs answering the same problem over and over. that may be a bit of a crapshoot, of course.
Another thought on the personal data. It could be that in order to protect the Direct resource, we might have to have an extra step in there. Sort of (1) you try to get an answer in the open forum based on what information is safe to post there, (2) you get moved to the Direct forum if that's needed, and (3) when you get into the queue of one of the techs, the first thing he'll ask for (or maybe it's just a required step of getting moved there) is a set of information that everyone should provide up front. The user responds and gets handled the next time he's at the top of the queue.
I don't think that they'll ever be a perfect solution (except of course, when the Cubs win the Series, in which case all questions will be answered and peace will reign throughout the universe...or, it could be Armageddon. I forget which), but it's something. If the traffic is directed, it might be possible to pump up activity in the open forums while also using the tech resources we have in the best way possible. Well, just a thought, anyway. A very long, rambling thought.......
Ron | |
number3fan
Number3fan
join:2003-10-15
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to RadioDoc
The tech forum is GONE, thanks to those worthless butttards who had a hardon for it from day one. God forbid that techs were actually able to converse and figure things out. Oh NO we cant have any of that!, they may actually figure out that the powers that be are truly clueless!. Sorry for the rant, i just miss all my tech forum buddies!
If they bring it back, LEV you better be IM'ing be with my access! | |
|
