How are “daily” mailings of Q-and-A enabled? Is there an explanation somewhere?

I disabled mailings a couple days ago since nothing was showing up.

Tom

As you might see near the top, one of the reported errors is that the “Handle must be at least 1 character”. The image might not be easy to read, but take my word for it — there was no place provided to type in any ‘handle’.

No reason given why a ‘handle’ is required, no explanation how a ‘handle’ is different from the user ID I’ve always gone by, no description of what a ‘handle’ is, and no place to put one if I could figure out what I was typing. I don’t know it is nor why I need it, but I can’t make any other changes without one.

Anyway, the rest of the story –

Before this evening, I never chose to have any ITKE e-mails sent to me. But I realized that I didn’t know what others were saying when they complained about ITKE e-mails they received. Then this evening’s spam flood hit, lasting for at least six hours. It finally struck me that ITKE might essentially be operating as an open relay for spam, so I figured I’d see how to enable some e-mails to me so I could see what was arriving in members’ inboxes.

Perhaps fortunately, I’m not allowed to make any changes to enable any e-mails until my ‘handle’ has at 1 character.

Does anything work around here?

Tom

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/abuse/spam/

Let me know if you succeed.

Tom

Tom

Tom

My impression of the purpose of the site is for professionals to help other professionals. Yet, questions often come from apparent home users who want to know how to get PCs talking to their ISPs’ routers (or get their MagicJack working) or from students needing info about ‘heavy metals’ or, maybe most troubling, from very small business owners who need help but who can’t (won’t) hire/contract for it.

I am more than happy to help someone who might be in an operations job and who wants to get into CL or even RPG programming to handle operational issues. And I’m fine with helping to guide students who are willing to try working things out before presenting their work to us to get past obstacles. (I don’t even care if English is their second language.)

But there are definite ethical issues in giving free technical help that would be better served as part of someone’s daily paid work.

There are dozens (hundreds? thousands? ??) of free-help forums and sites out there. I even contribute to some sometimes. For this site, though, I’d like to see it as an aid to the working lives of actual technical workers.

The site FAQ begins:

• IT Knowledge Exchange was created to allow IT pros to ask questions, get answers,
  collaborate and exchange knowledge with their peers.

(Emphasis added.)

But it doesn’t seem to be enough. There are plenty of days when the mix of pro/am questions is 50/50 or worse. The implication is that new posters commonly have an incorrect impression of what the site is all about.

So, maybe something like the opening FAQ sentence could be embedded right in the ‘Ask a Question’ box whenever it’s on a page. In bold. With high-contrast colors. And BIG letters.

The site “identity” simply needs to be more obvious. It needs to catch the eyes of more “pros” and fewer “ams” to become what the FAQ asserts.

Just IMO.

Tom

This time I tried on twitter, but got no answer, then I emailed Melanie, to find out she is no longer at ITKE, and finally I emailed Michael.

I think that removing spam posts quickly is very important, as real questions get lost or go unnoticed because of spam.