MS has hired contractors in India to man the forums. Although they have been
strictly instructed to follow a "community first" policy (that is, give
ordinary volunteer end users the opportunity to answer first) and not answer
questions until they are 12-24 hours old without an answer, what we're
seeing is that many of them (a) rush in with an answer, usually a reference
to a KB article that may or may not be relevant (it's hard to tell without
actually clicking on the link and going to the article, since they don't
quote the title of the article), (b) ignore previous answers that may
actually be more helpful, and then (c) mark their replies as Answers. We're
trying to get this corrected, but since the contractors are being paid based
on their performance, it's hard to see how that's going to work. There is
also a lot of resistance to the point system, which a lot of us see as
having a bad influence on those who are NOT being paid to answer.

Rest assured, the MVPs will continue to soldier on as long as we can. What
I'm finding, though, that the reduction of granularity in the forums (30
English-language Word NGs poured into three Word forums) means that each
forum contains more questions that I'm not qualified to answer and
consequently have to skip, making it more time-consuming for me to handle
the questions. There's also considerable angst about the fact that there are
no product-specific VBA or "programming" forums--just a single Office
Programming forum on Answers and separate Word, Excel, and Outlook
development forums on MSDN, where end users are less likely to find them.
Access is even worse off: down from 28 English-language NGs to one forum
shared with Visio and Project!

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"dp" wrote in message
...
Suzanne (if you get this post)

I notice that some responders in 'Answers' actually work for MS which you
and others MVPs do not. How will this affect those of you we have been
speaking to?
Are they timing this change with the release of 2010? Will th others be
using another forum or is 'Answer' the replacement?

Thanks
Dottie

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

I have noted considerable fall-off in all the msnews NGs. I think people
have already started migrating to Answers, as there seems to be a steady
increase in questions posted there.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message
...
Has the newsgroup been turned off? No new posting since 9:24 am (EDT)!


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