Know-How Exchange : Our Forum

I usually do not request an email, but I often go back and check a few days after posting. On questions that are of particular interest I will request email messages.

I really do appreciate it when the person who posed the question interacts with the group, and I will usually check multiple times when I see the original poster active in the discussion.

I'd guess I revisit questions to which I've posted a response at least 50-60% of the time. Sometime I will respond off-line to a point raised by someone in response to a question, particularly if it's not directly relevant to the thread.

Only in some cases do I want to see other's responses. Such as when it is a question that interests me and may have bearing on work I am doing. But often I answer the questions and am perfectly happy to have left my $0.02 and not hear any more.

I always lsign up for updates. I like to see when someone had updated a thread that I have been active in, or might like to become active in.

Other peoples answers might provide a little more light or food for thought, and I always think it worth spending a little bit of time each day catching up, and we all kinda become 'mates', and its almost like catching up with how people are, what people think etc

I only subscribe to a couple of the forums, so I find that its not too intrusive on my time :-)

I subscribe to all questions that i answer, and ones i would like to know the answer too but don't have enough knowledge to even a tempt an answer.

I also like it when someone emails me privately to say thank you.

I do not think the system should default to sending emails - I'm getting too many emails already.

It seems to me it's easy enough to go to my own profile page, see which recent posts are still open, open them in a new tab (i.e. in FireFox) and check the recent postings.

I always request an email notification when I have felt able to make a contribution – after all, I want to see whether others agreed or disagreed or added to it – and hopefully to see if it helped the questioner. Setting the alert is no problem.

I occasionally set an alert on questions where I am interested in the potential thread and want to learn from the answers but don’t have anything of value to say.

To overcome the potential problems of getting large numbers of emails, I only answer questions where I feel I have some level of competence – or where the temptation to attempt a bit of humour is too great. I shoot through the MP emails very rapidly with a mental “Not interested, Havn’t a clue, why don’t you get a real job, etc. etc.” and delete the lot. Where I follow the thread, I find the email alert invaluable, but I wouldn’t suggest it as a default, even from the membership profile. I feel that we should always opt in to emails.

Nice question. Now who’s going to do the cluster analysis on the responses and which twerp will now tell me that you need a regression to forecast the stats for the whole of the MarketingProfs community?

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions