*BSD News Article 76330


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: A word to all people with questions
Date: 17 Aug 1996 12:12:02 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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All you out there who've got occasional questions,

lately it happens more and more that people are approaching me in
private mail just only since i'm answering many questions here in
Usenet.  I'm sure this happens to other people as well.

Basically, please use the ``official'' support methods.  If you've got
a question, write it here, or send it to the mailing list
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org.  This is not to be unfriendly, but keep
in mind:

. We are doing this as a volunteer job besides our regular paywork,
  family etc.; we are generally already getting more than 100 emails
  per day, some of us are in the area of 500 per day.

. We are no gods, we don't know everything.  When answering Usenet
  questions, i'm picking those where i believe i've got some knowledge
  or experience, while i skip questions i think will best be answered
  by others.  If you are sending us a question in private mail, it's
  not unlikely that sending it to the abovementioned wider forums would
  have given you a quicker and more precise answer.

. Even for general questions, there are more people who can answer
  it if you send it to a public forum.  This takes load off those
  people who are dealing with the ``more detailed'' questions.  Keep
  in mind, even a simple question requires some 5 minutes to be
  answered, so ten of them make almost an hour.  I cannot (and will
  not) devote more than three or four hours per day to FreeBSD work
  on average, and sure i would also like to continue contributing
  code to the system (since this is the fun part).

So please, unless you have a very good reason to send something to the
developers in private mail (like you've got a question regarding the
worm driver i wrote, and you are sure this question would be too
specific for the freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org mailing list), don't do it.

Even though i wrote this for me, you can substitute anybody else as
well.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)