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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | Re: [gislist] software-specific questions |
| Date: |
06/15/2006 03:10:01 PM |
| From: |
Quantitative Decisions |
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At 03:17 PM 6/15/2006 -0400, RICK GRAY wrote:
>I'd like to point out
>that the reason I use this list, as I suspect do many others, is that you
>almost
>ALWAYS get an answer here, whereas the various ESRI lists are more often than
>not unresponsive to the "elementary" queries.
I believe that. But the reason may surprise you: the various ESRI lists,
including the ones I started, are essentially defunct, because the medium
has changed: people now post through Web interfaces such as ESRI's AV 3.x
forums at http://forums.esri.com/forums.asp?c=3 .
These forums are organized by topic and are (in a primitive way)
searchable. For the last year, I find 852 threads in the core forum, 288
in the Avenue forum, and 95 in the Spatial Analyst forum, even though these
are for the "dead" outmoded version of ArcView and therefore are relatively
inactive. (The ArcGIS forums generate about ten times the
activity.) These have generated 2,273 messages responding to 89% of the
queries posted. Because I have read them all, I can characterize those
that did not receive any responses: they either deal with interfacing to
other software, such as Oracle, or they are simply
incomprehensible. Elementary queries almost always generate rapid and
accurate responses, even on weekends. Check for yourself.
Having been actively involved in providing online responses to GIS related
questions for ten years now, I have long noticed that the quality and
accuracy of responses on forums like ESRI's, MapInfo's and Manifold's are
usually much better than appear in this one. This is not intended to
denigrate the many excellent responses from highly capable individuals that
do appear here: it's just a generalization and like all generalizations has
exceptions. It ought to influence where you consider posting your
questions, however.
The vendor-specific lists are terrible places to discuss GIS in general,
GIS concepts, and complex interfacing issues. Those are ideal topics for
this list.
Cheers,
Bill Huber
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