John,
In retrospect, my previous response was overly glib.
I request that people mark my responses as having answered the question when
warranted in order to increase my reputation within the community and to mark
myself as a reliable source of information about Office. As someone new to
the profession, and even newer to working as an Office Solutions Specialist,
I am searching for ways to increase my participation and enhance my abilities.
I am not sure if you are aware, but when you get to 50 questions answered,
you get a bronze medal next to your name in these forums. You get the silver
medal at 100 and the bronze at 500. MVPs get an MVP badge. While I don't
pretend that getting a bronze medal is a "great" accomplishment, it is
something. Additionally, I hope to become an MVP in the next few years, and
since community participation is one of the considerations for MVP status, I
see participation here, and my reliability here, as one of the means to
achieve that goal. Additionally, obtaining one of the medals is something I
can mention when reviewing my performance with my boss as evidence of my
professional development and my involvement in the Microsoft Office community.
Since I am helping people here largely voluntarily (though I do admit that I
often post during "down time" at work or while waiting for things to load,
copy, or save, and I do have the alterior motive of having my posts drive
traffic to my blog), I do not feel bad about asking people to mark my
questions as helpful. I have spent as much as several hours on individual
responses (usually much less!), so asking for a few seconds doesn't seem too
overbearing. I also only try to ask when I have clearly answered the question
and the poster has responded thanking me for my post.
Doug
--
Douglas Ryan VanBenthuysen
Office System Solutions Specialist
3Sharp
http://blogs.3sharp.com/Blog/dougv/
"John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macinto" wrote:
Hi Doug:
Why would you ask him to do that? Does anyone take any notice of those
silly ratings?
I wonder if you know that most of the posters in here are coming in via NNTP
or some other site and can't even SEE the ratings :-)
Cheers
On 4/2/07 7:01 AM, in article
, "DougieVan"
wrote:
I'm glad it could help. I would appreciate it if you could mark this post as
having answered your question in the forum.
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410