Dan Rigsby – Coding Up Style

Everyone has goals in their lives: some big, some small.  Many times people make goals just because the challenge is there such as beating a video game, running a marathon, or going for Olympic gold .  Early this year I laid out a number of professional goals that I wanted to accomplish this year.  Many of them I have reached, but one of them would take more work than the others, and I wasn’t sure I could hit.  I wanted to reach 5 out of 5 stars on Microsoft’s MSDN message forums.  These forums are setup by Microsoft for people in the community to ask questions about Microsoft technology.   There are a lot of people out there doing development who need assistance, but don’t know where turn.  And no one can know everything about all of Microsoft’s products, so even the most technically savvy people need help when learning something new.  The forums are a venue for asking these questions and getting response from the community. The great thing about this community site is that anyone can attempt to answer the questions even if they aren’t Microsoft employees.  This gives everyone a chance to share knowledge and learn from one another.  So I set out to help out on these forums and see if I could learn some things myself.

As with many “social” sites, there are little rewards for contributions.  MSDN Forums offers contribution points that are automatically given out based on a user’s level of activity and helpfulness on the forums.  These points turn into stars that appear under a persons name once that have reached a set number of points.  Up to 5 stars that can be earned.  I am ecstatic to report that I have finally reached the maximum level of 5 out of 5 stars.   It is quite an honor that takes an amazing amount of time to accomplish. There aren’t many out there that have reached this level yet, but there are a handful who have, and I am sure there will be many more after me.

I snapped the following screenshot after I finally broke 15,001 participation points.  I had a beer to celebrate and my wife congratulated me.  She, more than anyone, knows how many hours and evenings I have put in over the last many months helping people and gathering up these points.   I have to give her a lot of credit for letting me spend so much time on this.  I probably averaged 10 hours a week just on the forums (some weeks much more). These stars are a nice “badge of honor”, but at the end of the day, they don’t buy you anything tangible. The real joy is knowing that you are helping out others and learning in the process.

Getting 5 stars isn’t an easy task. As previously mentioned, points are accumulated for activity on the forums, and each star requires an ever increasing number of points.  According to the MSDN Forums FAQ here are how points are awarded:

And here are how many points are required to get to the next star level:

An average response to a question takes at least 2 posts.  So there is around 4 points per question average.  If the user marks your post as an answer, that turns into 14 points.  Sometimes people mark your posts as helpful and you can turn that into 19 points.  However, I have never sees posts marked as bug workarounds, or bug validations.  The annoying part of working on the forums is that about 80% of the time, the person who you helped doesn’t mark the question as answered.  This not only means that you don’t get points, but also means that this post won’t really help others in the future.  How many times have you searched for something .net related and got back a result that was on a MSDN Forum page?  I think I get back MSDN Forums pages about 99% of the time.  If these posts are marked as “answered”, then other users can work off the solutions.  Fortunately, there are quite a few Microsoft employees that help monitor the forums and do come in and help keep posts marked as “answered”.  However, they still miss around 30% of the answers.    I am only saying this so that if you start playing on forums, you know what to expect and don’t get too frustrated.

My primary reason for becoming active on the forums at first was to help me come up with blog ideas.  It is a great way to see where people are struggling with a technology and where the gap in documentation is. Early this year, I was active on over a dozen forums.  I racked up a large number of points fast, but the time commitment was too great.  Since, I have been primarily focused on Windows Communication Foundation (Wcf) right at work at speaking engagements, I  have been most active on the Wcf forum.  They keep a chart at the bottom of each forum to show the top answers for a 30 day period.

So now that I have reached this goal, what is next?  I am not going to stop my participation.  I have come to enjoy them too much, and I have found its a great way for me to learn too.  I may cut back a bit on the amount of time and so that I can concentrate on producing quality blog posts again.  Once I hit 4 stars I was got more active on the forums and put a lot of things on the back burner.  I need to regain some kind of balance in my life again now.  Who knows, one day with enough participation and patience, I might get an email asking me to become a moderator on the forums.  I am not going to hold my breath for this, but that would probably be the pinnacle of my MSDN Forums experience.

I’ll leave you with two closing pleas:

• If you know a lot about a particular Microsoft technology, I encourage you to jump on the forums and start helping others.  I am sure you will find it as rewarding as I have.  It may even help gain you some exposure.  About 30% of my blog traffic comes from links I have placed on the forums.  It important to help out others as others have helped out you.
• If you have any questions about Microsoft technology, I encourage you to also jump on the forums and start asking questions.  There are a lot of bright and eager people out there who can help you.  And if you have a Wcf question, I would love to help you out on the forums!

BTW, Nicholas Allen has a blog post about how to get help with Wcf: http://blogs.msdn.com/drnick/archive/2008/03/17/how-to-get-help-with-wcf.aspx.  In this post he specifically mentions and links to the MSDN Forums for Wcf.  Nick is currently probably the most active and prolific Wcf blogger right now.  If you are interested in Wcf and don’t subscribe to his blog, here is a link to his RSS feed: http://blogs.msdn.com/drnick/rss.xml.