Suggested alternative to the mailing list: Experts Exchange

[Kjetil Kilhavn]

If you consider this spam, I am sorry. I am all against spam, but I think
mailing lists belong to the pre-historic era of the internet even if they can be
useful. Therefore I will suggest a move to a web-based service. Comments and
discussion will be appreciated, because not all suggestions are good suggestions
in this world.
 
Usenet news adds the user friendliness of topic threads, and is an improvement
over mailing lists in my opinion. However, I have recently (medio december)
started using an internet service which is web-based and offers additional
advantages over the usenet newsgroups. The additional advantages are the
possibility to browse or search through questions asked previously, as well as
an incentive mechanism for those providing answers. Neither is it prone to be
the victim of spammers.
 
Experts Exchange (http://www.experts-exchange.com/) is a site where you can ask
a question, paying with (free) "question points". A limited amount of question
points is available as you register, and you gain additional free points every
day you use the site. There are also other ways of gaining additional question
points, e.g. answering surveys. If you ask a lot you may purchase additional
question points (using hard and real currency).
 
Anyone who has registered as an expert can offer a suggested answer, and you can
accept or reject that answer to award "expert points" to the person. The expert
points are worth nothing and can not be converted into question points. They are
thus not taxable either, so what you get from them is honour (and possibly a
fight between people to top the expert list of the topic). Additionally, if you
earn a sufficient amount of expert points, you can get a T-shirt (and another
and anot...).
 
I have asked (and others had asked before me) the people running the service to
add topics for ABAP and/or SAP Workflow. The response was positive (15th of
December), but as of today there are still no topics available. Instead of
waiting for SAP topics to become available I will with this recommend the site
to all of you. If there is traffic related to SAP the topic will probably show
up as well.
 
My suggestion: use the topic "Programming software & languages (general)" until
SAP topics become available.
--
KjetilK, in it for the T-shirts :-)
 
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