Thread

The last two weeks it has happened to me several times on several forums: a user pm’ing me with a question that might as well have been posted on the forums.

This often annoyes me: why do they take the trouble of pm’ing me? It takes the same/less effort to put it in (the right) category of the forums. Do they think they will get a better answer from me? A faster? Why miss up on the opportunity to hear multiple opinions?

So far, I’ve always replied to those messages. A PM is a little like an e-mail, I don’t like to leave it unanswered and most of the time, I feel compelled to answer as fast as possible. But I also always mention people might be better off asking their questions in the forums.

Has one of you ever experienced this? How did/do you react? What do you think of this?

I wish you would have just PM’d someone about this…

:lol:

I guess you have to live with the fact some people see you as their code guru.

IMO pm’s should be to share not public ready code and remarks that are not meant for public consumption.

In other forums, I also was PM’d before. Other developing environment. I never had a problem to point out that general questions belong into the forum, otherwise they would need to pay me for “private solutions”.

You also see often in signatures from very active users “Don’t bother pm me” or something like that, seems to be a common ‘disease’, I also don’t understand it.

If that annoyes you, start to post only silly answers in reply to forum posts so that people will think you are not that good. You shouldn’t receive anymore PM’s then :lol:

More seriously: add to your signature a note pointing people to search the forum before PM you.