My apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you were advocating a forum and I should have said that it is AN answer not THE answer.
As far as having only minimal response, you'd be surprised. For every 1 question that makes it on the list, there are 10 that don't. I am currently guiding 3 people in learning to use Stata. All 3 took one look at the statalist activity for one day and declined to think about it. For people like this, being told something on the order of "...if the directory already exists, Stata can't create it." is invaluable. It is also enough to drive you to drink if your are searching for help on something more significant to the real world (such as GLM or somthing).
BTW, the question was real and very frustrating for a physician. It came from lesson one of the current online short course. Not the fault of the lesson plan, simply a Dr. making things too hard.
RFarmer
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Michael
Blasnik
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 9:36 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: What's off-topic for Statalist? Remembrances of things
past...
I actually did not suggest different forums to split up Statalist into
several topic areas and I don't agree with that idea. If there were a
Statalist forum for working with MS Office (for example), then there would
be about 2 threads per month and no one would ever look there, forcing
people to post their queries into other topic areas...
Although Statalist traffic is fairly high I don't think it has reached the
point of needing separate topic areas and believe that would make it less
appealing. Informative subject lines are the best approach but we also know
that there will always be a small but noticeable fraction of posts with
poorly worded subject lines and off-topic or too basic questions. If only
we could set up a special forum for queries that don't belong on Statalist
and then all of those questions would be routed there along with the
out-of-office automated replies, that would be worthwhile ;}
Michael Blasnik
[email protected]
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