Huddled Masses

Here it is. According to my observations, this is the list of places where I recommend you seek help for PowerShell related quandaries, in order of the speed of response. The first two are practically a tie, but I have put them in this order because the first is just a much better place to get questions answered, with no limits on length of posts. In almost every case, you’ll get faster responses during US daytime, due to sheer volume of users…

1. IRC #PowerShell on IRC.Freenode.net.
2. Twitter. Use a the word “PowerShell” in a tweet with a question.
3. Usenet. Microsoft.public.Windows.PowerShell (or via Google Groups).

1. Web Forum. On PowerShellCommunity.org

The funny thing is, Twitter can be fast, but it’s not a very effective way of getting answers to anything but trivial questions. Usenet can be fast, but it can also ignore you completely. IRC can be astonishingly fast … if you happen to come in while several high level geeks are having a conversation and thus, paying attention … but at other times (especially in the middle of the USA sleep hours) you might not get an answer at all, depending on who’s paying attention that day. Hypothetically, the WebForum would be the best place to ask — since unanswered questions there still stay in an “unanswered” list that MVPs and others can check — but for some reason it’s never built up the critical mass of users that would allow it to be fast around the clock, or even to answer every single question…

I’m secretly hoping someone will develop a piece of web software which will function as a web forum with an option to email subscribe (like CodePlex’s forums). But in addition, will also function as a web interface to Usenet a-la Google Groups, so that we could set up a web forum which posted questions to an existing Usenet group. It would also need a web-service feed … so we could write a bot that could post new questions to IRC (or a Jabber conference room) and Twitter. It wouldn’t necessarily have to accept answers via IRC/Jabber/Twitter, since those users are usually willing to click through if they think they can help answer a question … this would be the ultimate web forum software. Why can’t I find it already written?

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