You know, you guys *CAN* PM us if you have question about something.
We're human, too. We occasionally need to come up for air to eat, sleep (sometimes--seems rare these days), and occasionally even engage in that first love of all FTers, travel. Personally, I've just spent two weeks in Israel and am trying to spend the next two weeks in India, although Newark weather and mechanical breakdowns of 777s is making that increasingly difficult. (At least United is paying for my hotels.)
Not an intentional change; just a bit of real-life getting in the way for your
volunteer moderators. And please do help us continue to shape the forum, although I did want to address one comment:
I'm not suggesting that this forum should be "for all questions about anything for newbies," and indeed, I don't think that's the best direction for this forum to head in. However, the idea that this would be a dedicated flame-free zone where newbies could post their questions without fear of harsh, unfriendly responses or curt "do a search" posts
was bandied around--if not in public or in the official motion to create this forum, then definitely in the private TalkBoard forum, and it was never (to my recollection, anyway) officially refuted as one of the goals of this forum. I am still trying to figure out where the balance in all of this is. When voting for the creation of this forum on TalkBoard (and subsequently volunteering to moderate it), I also didn't really realize it was going to be as much of a transit area as it has turned out to be...and moving threads around the forums (and explaining why, even with text on file I can copy and paste) takes time. Perhaps we might need to hire a third librarian one of these days.
I appreciate all of the reported posts that you guys keep sending. Especially with my recent travels, I haven't had the chance to keep up on reading the Information Desk forum regularly, so I depend on your reports to make sure people are getting their questions directed to the best places possible to receive the maximum number of assistance. The way the FT software handles reported posts and tracking of issues and all of that is massively inefficient, and so it does take valuable time to deal with them--I've been working on the backlog for the last several hours and still have about 1/3 of the pile left to go through. We'll get there soon, though, and I'll keep doing my best.
