Maintain the support narrative

[plowmanplow]

I have noticed a trend recently. I spend a fair amount of time on these forums mostly doing custom modpack support while also trying to contribute elsewhere as I can. Lately, I will respond to a request for help in a thread only to have the original poster start responding with the extra needed information (like links and logs) in personal messages to me. This causes a few challenges.

 

First, I'm only one person. There are a lot of brilliant, helpful folks on these forums and as soon as the responses go private they all lose the opportunity to contribute.

 

Second, there are a lot of folks who come here looking for help and search the forums for solutions to their problems. If all they find are questions without answers it detracts from the community and creates more work for folks such as myself who like to help.

 

And last, but not least, sending me a separate personal message half way through a thread trying to solve a problem is very distracting and requires that I take a not insignificant amount of time figuring out the context of the message. I help a lot of different people and I don't really remember who has what problems. Keeping the information in the original threads will reduce my distraction and and let me focus on what I enjoy: fixing custom modpacks.

 

Each thread is a narrative that starts with the original post and often flows through many responses before reaching a conclusion. Breaking that story by taking responses out of band I feel is a detriment to the community. Let's keep things focused and organized so we can all provide the best support possible.