In a matter of a few minutes, I suddenly got three offline messages with follow up questions. I usually don't mind, though each time I reply to such messages, I include the text below. In this case, I thought I'd share these thoughts with the rest of the list.
- - - - There are very good reasons to send messages (including follow up questions) to the list, and not to the person. 1) People on the list help each other out voluntarily. No one here is required to help out. We all do this out of the kindness of our hearts, to make the community better, because we want to share what we know, or because we're bored with what we're doing at the moment (or many other reasons). Singling out someone puts more responsibility on them than we should. A person may not mind at all, but we should still avoid doing it. If you get a reply through the list, your best bet is to post follow up questions to the list as well. 2) The person you're sending the email to may no longer be available. Because we do this voluntarily, the person you singled out may suddenly be unavailable due to any number of reasons, such as work, family, etc. Even if the person was willing, if s/he is unavailable, you'd be stuck with no response and nowhere to go. Oh, except back to the list, of course, which is where you should've gone to in the first place. 3) Someone else may have an alternative solution. It may or may not be better, it may or may not be more appropriate, but if you never give them the chance to reply, you'll never know. There have been several instances where the one posting the question changed strategies entirely based on input from the community, sometimes from someone who wasn't originally responding to the question. 4) The struts user list is newbie-friendly, and you shouldn't be afraid of asking newbie questions. In fact, some people may be wanting to give back to the list by answering questions but are unable to reply to the tougher ones and are looking for easy questions to begin with. 5) The most important reason is to share the solution with the rest of the community. Discussing solutions offline cuts off the rest of the community from it. Someone else might be interested in the solution, if not at the moment, then at some future time when they search the archives. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
