Why I stopped contributing (especially to expert forums)...

Question

In reply to the recent topic that raised the suggestion of Platinum contributors, Rich write:
<i>In response to the above, I have to say, that the driving force behind most of the top contributors here on SDN is to help their peers. If a Top Contributor slows or stops in his contributions, it is either one of two things, 1) he simply doesn't get anything out of it anymore( the feeling you get when you help someone) or 2) he is not contributing due to lack of availibility, meaning that maybe his employer has cut him off from doing so during work hours, or the work load is simply too much and there is not time for contributing.</i>
I'm interested in the reasons why people have stopped or slowed, especially in the product expert forums.
I thought I'd share my experience, as I was one of the top portal forum area posters for a while.
Basically I got tired of the repetitious questions where there had been no attempt to do basic research. So, rather than using the search option, or following the well documented links to the wiki pages which a few of us spent quite a bit of time constructing, people would just post a question.
What's wrong with this?  The forum is here to help. Yes, but I like to find the more meaty, interesting questions! For example, after the 1000th question about logon tickets or "how do I get involved in this portal thing", all with well documented answers, it was becoming harder to find a "new" question or one which made me think "yeah, something to spend some time working on".
Of course, it did help that I was travelling away from home more and it was often more productive to spend some time answering questions when stuck in a hotel room, so I also can tick the "time availablity" answer to reduced SDN posting.
Cheers

Answer 1

Hi Michael and Gareth,
This is not exactly the thread that I was hoping to come back to from my 3 month family leave: Why top contributors stop contributing.
It is for sure an interesting question and something that keeps us Community Evangelists up at night.
I think we are the victims of our own success. Because we have such active contributors and timely replies people get lazy and don't search. And there is a reward for posting a new answer or a copy from an older answer in points.
How could we reward searching and reusing? It is sad that the challenging questions are drowned out in the noise of repeated ones.
Extra newbie forums don't solve the problem, if you are too lazy to search, you are also too lazy to find the right forum.
We do have mark for review in the Wiki. It would be great to have something similar in the forums too. Where members can mark a question as repeat. Experts can then set their filter to no repeat questions and it would shame the poster.
Another possibility would be to put in an extra step when opening a thread. Once the question is posted, a search is started in the background and possible threads are shown, which can be checked out without loosing the question, that way the system searches for you.
> We seem to be heading toward being an interview
> question/answer line: <b>which stinks</b>.  If
> someone gets the job based on this form of cheating -
> and it is cheating when people are given interview
> questions responses - they are supposed to be
> checking your experience - then the client who is
> unlucky enough to have hired gets someone with no
> experience or skills of their own.
These interview questions only help you if you research them before, which means that someone is doing his or her homework, which isn't a bad thing. The answers help to get deeper into the topics too. We all started once and having these answers helps also to ease the fear of the interview for people that are less experiance. There are only so many interview questions that can be asked and prepped for, so it goes back to people not searching It is the task of the hiring manager to find out the real depth of candidate's knowledge.
Any suggestion to bring our members to search more are greatly appreciated, Mark.