Searching the Forum before Posting

There is a great deal of Information held in these Forums. Before a question is posted, it is always a good idea to search the old postings for a solution which already exists. If there are fewer repeated postings, it takes the people who try to read every question (you know who you are :slight_smile: ) less time to read the through the questions and more time to provide answers/insight. Also, if an answer is found in the Forums, the feedback is immediate. There is no waiting for someone to post a reply. So everyone is benefited. I am in no way saying that people shouldn’t ask questions here, so keep posting your questions. Just my 2 cents worth (or 1 cent US). Chris Krantz NCSD,NCSQL,MCSD,MCSE Microforum Inc. Toronto, Ontario, Canada

While chris has a point, I don’t think the forums are too high traffic that it takes long to read all the posts every day. If you do a search then you do get an answer immediatly and it does take hours to get a response but each problem is slightly different so the answer do not quite fit out requirements. Some times people ask question which realy means am I doing this right, especially when just starting out with Navision. As we have all been there before and we should help out. Some questions just keep poping up that we all need reminding of such as why do I get XXX when I use ‘+2M-CM’ in calcdate. Some time you see questions answered ‘Have yo searched’ or ‘Look at the answer to …’ pointing people in the right direction, which is OK. I don’t want to say anything that stops people asking questions (well not until we get a 500 posts a day). Paul Baxter

Yup… but sometimes you can find also people asking the same questions other people just asked a few days ago… that means they just didn’t search for an answer and just tried the easy way… posting a question and waiting for someone to solve their problems without moving almost a finger. Knowledge forums like this are usually for solving problems, but not for having to solve the same problem a hundred times for different users as they don’t want to search for a previous post with the same problem. It the purpose had been that, forums should not need to keep any historical list of messages… just keeping the messages from a maximum of a month ago should be enought… :frowning: Regards, Alfonso Pertierra (Spain)apertierra@teleline.es

I have to agree and disagree with this post. First, I do a search every time I have a question first to see if I can find the solution. This makes good sense. But, as was mentioned, at times, your problem is slightly different, so that requires a new question. In addition, I have found many terms to be too general or difficult to search on. For example, trying to do a search on questions about the FIND command will yield tons of results, but none of them will be specific to your problem.

Torof… when a problem is different, the question is different… the problem is when having the same question lots of times (example: how to get the last day of next/previous month). Alfonso Pertierra (Spain)apertierra@teleline.es

I think it just makes good sense for everyone to do the best they can when searching. Of course we’re not going to find good hits for our searches all the time (although, a few of my searches have pulled up other interesting tidbits that I never knew I needed! grin). But I believe that if everyone makes the conscience effort to perform the best search they can, then perhaps a few of the new questions wouldn’t make it to the forums. People who abuse this must learn to realize that for everyone who accesses NOLUG, time is money (duh!). So, when I view a question from someone that seems, in personally opinion, has been already posted and “beaten to a pulp” in other messages, I will not take the time to answer it fully or at all. Unfortunately for the poster, they will not get a response or enough detail in the response to solve their problem, and subsequently will need to perform their search after all. So, it all “washes out in the end”, as far as I’m concerned. Just MY 2 cents worth (now down to about ½ cent U.S. today sigh). Regards! Kristopher Webb Kelar Corporation, Canada