How to and how not to get Badly Needed Information off of the Internet

(And why Content People Should Virtually Never Post in Internet Forums)

You would think that the best and quickest way to get an answer to why some bad thing has happened to your computer or to an internet site of yours would be to post a question on a forum or two and simply wait to get the answer. This is a complete myth.

The reality is that it is better to use your time to go to four, six, or eight forums, register if you have to and make liberal use of the search function. The vast majority of forums allow you to search everything even if you have never posted anything.

You do have to know all of the “advanced” tricks on how to do searches effectively and you have to be able to spot a search that just isn’t producing and move on to another site.

In a nutshell the reason why you don’t post on forums is that it actually takes more time to get the information that way than using searches on many different sites. Here’s why:

--You almost always get people coming on to your topic to deny the premise. I mean, you have multiple proofs that some bad thing has happened (malware, a Google blacklisting, or what have you) and yet there are always going to be people posting in your topic who claim you don’t really have a problem, and/or that the problem you have is of a different nature than you know it to be. These are people who either by accident or on purpose are trying to completely invalidate the topic. This is incredibly obnoxious and can take time you don’t have to deal with.

--You often get people who somehow miss the point of the topic (often but not always intentionally) and so they start to argue side points that don’t really matter with respect to the main topic at hand. For example, I post that Google has blacklisted my site and during the topic someone wants to argue about whether I have too many code errors on my site or not. (It turns out that just as operating system registries supposedly accumulate dozens of errors after a while that Internet sites have hundreds or thousands of code errors which, however, usually do not prevent pages from loading correctly.)

--Even if you admit that the reason you have posted is that you don’t have enough skills, experience or training to be qualified to guess at the answer, most of the people who post in the topic will assume that you are an idiot not only with respect to those things but also in general! The prevailing attitude is, in effect: “Anyone begging for assistance about a specific Internet or computer fiasco must be rather incompetent overall”.

Very few people seem to understand the actual situation, which is that you have a specific, discrete issue you want answers for and that, apart from that issue at least, you are completely competent. (Indeed, you would never have reached the point of having the problem if you were not generally quite competent, but that logic seems to escape most of the people who post responses in forum topics.)

To put it bluntly, there are always going to be people who incorrectly think you are a loser simply because you had to ask the question. These are people who will greatly slow down the progress of your topic mostly because they will deter many other people from trying to help you out.

--Sometimes, someone will come on a topic and just point blank claim you are a moron. They don’t know you from Adam and yet they make their claim. These are people who are trying to destroy your topic without even using one of the common tricks used to do that (described right here.) They are blatantly and out in the open trying to destroy your topic.

--Your question is seldom answered in the correct framework. Commonly for example, if you ask “What is the most likely cause for this specific Internet or computer fiasco that has happened?” you have people giving you a laundry list without indicating what they think is the most likely. I mean, you on the one hand want ALL of the possibilities, but on the other hand you also absolutely have to have someone to at least roughly rank order them in terms of their likelihoods and it is like pulling teeth to get this seemingly modest objective in real life at forums. Either the knowledge level is not deep enough for rank ordering and for probabilistic assessments or whoever has the knowledge doesn’t think you deserve to get that knowledge.

--Unlike in other venues (on a blog of yours or on an unpublished document on your computer) you can not change something you have posted on a forum after new information comes in. You can’t update something if later it turns out you were very wrong about something. (But that never happens to me laugh out loud) Amount of time allowed for editing varies by forum, but my understanding is that very few forums allow for editing posts permanently.

So the bottom line is: resist the urge to post at forums. Paradox though it may be, this is not a productive way to get information about Internet and computer threats and fiascos and houses and cars and so on and so forth. Instead, you have to learn to be an expert at searching forums (there are specific search skills you have to learn) and you also have to learn to be an expert at separating the wheat from the chaff in what you find. Those skills are way beyond the scope here.

Exceptions, you ask? There are just two I can think of:

--You have a question so esoteric that virtually no one has ever asked it on the Internet before. This is far rarer than you might think; most questions have been asked at one time or another. On the other hand, if you are a very intelligent person, you probably will have from time to time questions that literally no one has ever asked on the Internet before, in which case you may have little alternative but to post on a forum or two.

--Political forums where everyone is on the same page (the same political ideology). It turns out that forums that naturally group those who think alike politically are the only known type of forum where you can post without having to deal with off point responses all the time. Even here attempts at topic destruction do happen, but the frequency of it is far less than when the group posting at the site is much more diverse.

In 2008 I more or less banned posting in recreational forums; I had better things to do and I was encountering some of the problems above even in those. In 2009 after several wasteful and even counterproductive experiences I more or less banned myself from participating in malware forums and also in real estate, house, and car forums. As of 2010, I am banning myself from participating in webmaster forums, probably one of the last remaining types of forums I was still eligible to ask a question in. (I think I can still post at Chinese forums but I don’t know Chinese, laugh out loud.)

My stuff goes on my blogs only from here on out and no, I really don’t care what the traffic to them is because I know way too much about how traffic actually goes on the Internet and I know it is a fool’s game to worry about traffic, but that’s several other articles (stay tuned).

I did after roughly 12 hours of work get a rough rank ordering for the Google blacklisting problem I had, but I could have deduced it using innate intelligence and using multiple forum and other site searching in between one third and one half that much time without ever posting anything anywhere. I wasted 6-8 hours doing it the way I did it. I needed those hours for content and I lost them.

It should be noted however that the ultimate fault for all of that wastage lies with Google, which refuses to simply message anyone as to why their Web page has been blacklisted. In fact, Google doesn't even message webmasters to simply inform them that their Site has been blacklisted. Therefore, webmasters should at least once a month paste their http web address in the Google search box and make sure their site then shows up on page one of search results (usually the first item). If it doesn't show, it is proof positive evidence that your site has been completely removed from Google Search results (even though the site may still technically be in the "index"). The "Site:" search tells you whether you are in the index but it DOES NOT tell you whether you are blacklisted from results or not.

You can also dig into data at Google Webmaster Tools to monitor searching to your site: if and when searches via Google Search to your site chronologically end, you are blacklisted.

You know there are hordes of people who simply view forums and don’t even register, don’t you? You can do that at half or more forums around the Internet. And you probably know there are more hordes of folks who register but never post anything. If you think they are just wasting their time or just lurking (laugh out loud at that word) or whatever, it turns out that you are wrong. It turns out that the lurkers are the smart ones after all.

It turns out if you just want to hang out and chat forums are great but if you are a serious person who wants real answers forums are gigantic wastage of time traps. When you think of posting on forums, you should hear that sucking sound of your time going out the window in the back of your head. Resist the temptation to post anything on forums.

Once you have advanced skills in searching sites and in judging content, get the information you require from forums and sites and blogs and so forth without posting anything. If you have the search and judgment skills and you go to enough sites (it can take dozens in some cases but that sounds a lot worse than it is) you will get that information you need without ever posting anything.

I went down the wrong road several times (I couldn’t resist the temptation because I can never resist any such temptation laugh out loud; I have this thing about always wanting to prove things beyond a shadow of a doubt.) but now I can honestly and correctly report on what the right road is for getting specific, detailed information off of the Internet. It has now been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that posting in forums is actually counterproductive in almost all situations.