A further comment. I have just gone back a week and looked at 20 questions - 17 were already answered.

Of the remaining 3, 2 were awaiting further clarification from the original poster.

The remaining question I answered.

There is yet another reason why threads do not get answered!

Some threads get titles like "Urgent Help" - paradoxically such titles are less likely to get answered than had a meaningful title been used. At least one very well respected contributor to this forum makes a point of ignoring such threads!

Hi,

TATWORTH:

Some threads get titles like "Urgent Help" - paradoxically such titles are less likely to get answered

Very true. In the past I mostly sent private messages to those people to make them aware of that fact but I must say I've given up on it as most apparently keep on doing it.

Compare it with reading a newspaper, your eyes scan the headlines and you see 2 titles of the same height:

1. Read me urgently please.....
2. New medication that can possibly cure cancer found

What's the most likely article you're going to read? For me it would be the cancer medication article. The other title's completely meaningless so why would I spend some of my valuable time reading it? Having a good title that describes the actual problem you have highly increases the chance of getting viewed by more members and there should only be that one member reading it that can actually solve your problem...

Also clutter in messages like:

Hi, I am ... from ... and I live in ... and I am ... with that ... degree. Now to my question: I have a problem with ...

Nobody wants to read that first line and sometimes even get out. It's stuff that should go in the signature. Same goes for the "Please mark as answer" sentence which I still see being added way too much to a reply.

Also too lengthy messages with hundreds or more lines of code which have totally nothing to do with the actual question gets people out. 

Conclusion: to improve the chance of getting decent and faster answers try to keep this guidelines in mind: have a good descriptive title that shortly explains the core of the problem. In the body place relevant information, code, things you already tried, solutions you sought for, links of possible solutions you already tried, ... 
 

Grz, Kris.

There is a further odd problem whereby one or more replies is marked as an answer, yet the thread is not marked as answered.

Yet another reason why threads do not get answered is that the thread is an announcement and not a question!

TATWORTH:

There is a further odd problem whereby one or more replies is marked as an answer, yet the thread is not marked as answered.

 

Some members do this intentionally.  They receive what appears to be a reasonable answer and then mark it as such.  but in an effort to keep their thread "open", in case somebody might have a better answer to offer, they reset the thread status back to unresolved.

TATWORTH:

Yet another reason why threads do not get answered is that the thread is an announcement and not a question!

or a Tip/Trick, or an FAQ...

Not all forums sections here have always supported the ability to mark as answer.  For example, Free for All did not used to show the mark as answer option.  So many of the earlier threads in that section would not be marked as answered.  Additionally, prior to the implementation of the Community Recognition program here, there was much less attention paid to the thread status and the answer marks.  Many many threads were answered but never marked as such (presumably because the OP was simply unaware that they should do so).

Ultimately, to the original question / suggestion that ASP.NET might somehow be unstable due to the frequency & no. of unanswered messages, i myself do not see any correlation.

Questions remain unanswered for a variety of reasons that have been noted throughout the thread already.  Those reasons are more related to;  the question's wording, the question's information (or lack thereof), the available time of a person who might volunteer to answer that question, the OP's desire to properly manage their thread status

 

 

mbanavige:

Some members do this intentionally.

 

I sometimes do this for the reason Mike gave.

Also, I have done this where a thread was prematurely marked as answered by someone else.

If the premature mark has some validity or relevance, I sometimes do not unmark it.

Other times, I may unmark it and then re-mark it later when imho the thread is resolved.

The disadvantage of answers marked as answer is that some members may abandon reading further when they see the first marked answer.

Regards ~~ Gerry

gerrylowry:

The disadvantage of answers marked as answer is that some members may abandon reading further when they see the first marked answer.

Thats true, I wont always revisit a marked as answer thread because a lot of the time its just a "thanks that worked" kind of post.

swaino:

Is it just me or does there seem to be an awful amount of messages that are getting unanswered? Or if they are unresolved, they are automatically resolved by someone else and not the originator?

Is this a sign that ASP.NET as a technology is failing from a stability and usability point of view?  I certainly think it could be, I would have thought as the technology stabilizes, there would be less problems coming in?

A further update for swaino - today as I look just the last 3 days of questions I have not read, I am swamped by questions that have been answered. On some pages I see 20 out 20 questions marked as answered! Can I find questions a few days old that are unanswered - they must be still there but currently I am overwelmed by the questions marked as answered!

So what can I do - I can now only look at the last 2 days of unviewed questions!

BTW I tend not to answer questions on page 1 and look for older questions not marked as answered.

Ok, I understand that there are many unanswered questions and that this is often the nature of this forum, people delaying in answering, people not aware of how to select them as answers etc. but I'm wondering if the volume of questions is reflecting the problems with the technology.

I mean I still don't have an answer to the 'Sys is undefined' problem from last week, so I've put that on the back burner.  I think I'll have to fiddle with where the JavaScript is being rendered in the ASP.NET page.  If someone brought out a new programming language which sometimes failed depending on where the code is placed within the file, we'd instantly reject it as too unreliable.  But this seems to be what I'm working with.

This morning I am now getting 'Unable to Start Debugging on the Web Server' so I can't even debug my project to see why I'm getting an exception.  Putting this error message in the ASP.NET forums search brings back 958550 results!  I mean if this problem is causing nearly 1million posts, why hasn't it been fixed, or MS given us a proper solution to so we don't have to waste our time searching through 1 million posts of people having the same problem?

swaino:

I mean I still don't have an answer to the 'Sys is undefined' problem

In which case, I suggest that you either:

• Look for the FAQ on this in the forums FAQ section
  
• Raise a new query in a part of the forum dealing with AJAX.NET with a meaningful title.

You can help yourself get a timely usable answer by specifying:

• Language VB.NET or C#
• Compiler - VS2005 Pro, VS2010 Beta 2, VS2003 Express ect
• If VS2008 or later, the framework version being targetted
• The host O/S
• The exact error message
  

Can I make a suggestion? I suggest that Microsoft create a new sub-website or special page within the forums which deals with the top 100 problems identified by the number of raised posts on the forums.  Users could search the top 100 problems to see if there problem exists and go from there.  This must be way way better than me googling the heck out of an error or putting my error message in the forums search box and getting nearly a million posts returned!

I mean look at the problems people are having with the debugging problem: http://ryanfarley.com/blog/archive/2005/08/23/8540.aspx

Developers are having to spend valuable time trawling through reems and reems of possible fixes which are never guaranteed to work.

In addition, decent devlopers would be better being told the cause of the problem rather than the solution.  The problem with solutions is that they may fix the problem in a multitude of different scenarios.  This then means that for 1 specific problem there may be X number of possible solutions.  This is often the cause of the bloat of posts for a specific issue.  If we know what causes the problem, we may be in a better position to fix it.  Obviously, this does not always work in practice due to the complexities of the problem.  I know the MSDN articles often do something similar but why not link these with the top problems.

I am surprised as there appears to be no FAQ on "Sys is Undefined"

Have a look at:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/zainnab/archive/2007/04/09/ajax-fun-with-the-dreaded-sys-is-undefined-error.aspx
  
• http://www.jwc3.net/2008/07/sys-is-undefined-aspnet-ajax.html
  
• http://www.dotnetspider.com/resources/3129-Sys-undefined-ASP-NET-AJAX.aspx
  
• http://www.dotnetspider.com/resources/2404-Sys-undefined-ASP-NET--AJAX-Extensions.aspx
  
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1035663/asp-net-mvc-ajax-sys-is-undefined-error
  

I discovered an interesting behaviour, which may be by design.

On a Resolved thread where my answer had been marked as answer, I notice I had made a typo.

I edited the response, correcting only the single word and posted it.

My answer was unmarked and the thread was marked as Unresolved.

(Had there been other correct answers, I do not know whether the thread would have been marked Unresolved).

Because I noticed this behaviour, I reported it via "Alert Moderator".

Had I not noticed it, it is possible that it may have been forever unresolved.

Regards,
Gerry (Lowry)

gerrylowry:

On a Resolved thread where my answer had been marked as answer, I notice I had made a typo.

I edited the response, correcting only the single word and posted it.

My answer was unmarked and the thread was marked as Unresolved.

(Had there been other correct answers, I do not know whether the thread would have been marked Unresolved).

Because I noticed this behaviour, I reported it via "Alert Moderator".

Gerry,I faced exactly the same situation months ago,and you did the same thing I did ("Alert Moderator").Then my post has been remarked as answer,but I'm not sure who did at that time; the moderator or the owner of the thread?