This has been more or less my experience as well. Two of the
main reasons I began the comp.lang.c FAQ list were in hopes that
I'd see the incidence of FAQ's posted to the newsgroup decrease,
and that I'd get some warm fuzzies from people's feedback. I've
had to learn to satisfy myself, most of the time, with neither of
these; my only reward now is knowing (or, at least, having the
arrogance to assume) that I'm doing a good job, and that can get
pretty lonely sometimes.
Since the number of people who post without *ever* reading the
newsgroup is high, the questions which the FAQ list answers are
still asked Frequently. I can derive some satisfaction from
noting that, some of the time, the FAQ list's answer is cited in
followups, and the cascading rediscussion is reduced.
I have partial explanations for the lack of feedback. Saying
that people are ingrates is a bit (but only a bit) too harsh --
it's some kind of human nature, I guess. I know from my own
experience that I haven't written to all of the other FAQ lists'
authors whose lists I've had occasion to make use of, neither the
ones I've found particularly useful nor the ones I've noticed
typos or other errors in. If you're using an FAQ list to answer
some question, that question, and the larger problem it's part
of, are probably foremost in your mind; if you're anxious to get
the problem solved and move on with your project, it's all too
easy to put off dropping a note of appreciation to the FAQ list
author. Another trap which I know I fall into is that when
something is particularly well-written, I feel it deserves more
than a one-line "That was great!" response -- I'd like to wax
rhapsodic about *how* good it is, and if I have any criticisms or
suggestions, I'd like to balance them with positive comments.
And such a reply, of course, can take a good deal of time to
compose, and it's easy to put it off ad infinitum.
I suspect that there's something else going on which I can't
really explain but which I can perhaps illustrate with an
example. While at school I lived in a large collective house
with about 30 other people (pika at MIT, for those that know of
it). I was always one of the ones who was trying to fix things
(leaky pipes, balky radiators, etc.) when they broke, and got
pretty good at it, to the point that when I was an alumnus living
in the area, I would occasionally go back to the house to fix
something for them. (I was over there often enough, just
socializing.)
I was not alone in this -- my friend Arne did some plumbing for
the house, and I noticed that he never seemed to get much
recognition or appreciation for the work he did. He struggled
for months with a particularly nasty situation in some two inch
hot water lines in the basement. He'd come over, disappear into
the basement, take the pipes completely apart and solder them all
back together again until he thought he had them fixed, and then
leave; and he wouldn't hear anything until someone called him a
few weeks later to tell him that the pipes were still dripping.
In contrast, I once fixed a small leak in a pipe above the
kitchen ceiling. I figured that Saturday afternoon would be a
good time to fix it, forgetting that (a) projects like these
occasionally take longer than you think, and (b) when you're
cooking dinner for 30 people, you have to start pretty early in
the afternoon anyway. So it came to pass that I was standing on
a ladder in the middle of the kitchen, waving a torch around,
cursing the recalcitrant pipes, breaking the work light and
showering glass below, and setting the house on fire, while
swirling all around me were people trying to cook dinner, set
tables, clean the cooking utensils, etc.
The upshot of all this was that *everybody* in the house knew
*exactly* how hard I was working and *exactly* how much trouble I
was having. But since I did manage to fix the leak, and since it
had been a particularly high-visibility one (it had dripped on
the back of your neck as you stood at the sink), everybody was
extremely glad to get it fixed, and let me know in very
satisfyingly gratifying ways. Years later people were still
bubbling over (in my presence!) about what a hero I'd been fixing
that leak.
So I guess that if you want feedback (particularly of the
appreciatory kind), it's important to do a good job but *not*
make it look too easy. If you do a bad job, of course, you'll
get plenty of feedback, though not the kind you want; but if you
quietly do a very good but low-profile job (which is probably
what a lot of us strive for), it's extremely easy for people to
take the work for granted. I'm afraid this is only going to get
worse. When a particular FAQ list is introduced for the first
time, everyone remembers the time before its existence, and
appreciates (or at least recognizes) the change. But when most
groups have FAQ lists, all nice and orderly and collected in
news.answers and archived and cross-referenced and pointed to by
the postings in news.announce.newusers, and when most readers
have joined the newsgroup after the FAQ list came into existence,
it's even easier to treat it as just another part of the terrain.
From time to time I do a little bit of flogging or hyping of
comp.lang.c's FAQ list, mentioning it a bit more prominently than
necessary in regular posts I happen to make, or posting rafts of
excerpts in response to the rafts of FAQ's which are still
posted. I do so not so much to troll for feedback, but simply to
remind people that the list exists, and keep it in their
consciousness, and it seems to help a bit, but it's not something
I can keep up for any length of time, because I'm not a flack and
I'm incapable of doing any relentless promotion (self- or
otherwise), and I really would like to do a good job quietly in
the background and let my work speak for itself on its own
merits, although I now realize that whether or not it does so
speak, I'll rarely hear about it.
I'm not saying that any of this is Right, and I agree that it's
unfortunate, hard to accept, and hard to remember. I managed to
forget it, in a big way, just a few months ago: I spent the
better part of a week, nearly full-time, going through months of
old mail and saved news articles and doing a major update of the
comp.lang.c FAQ list, which was of course still not perfect but
which I thought was a significant improvement and one or two
parts of which I thought were particularly nice. I buoyed myself
up while doing all this work with anticipation of how much people
were going to appreciate it, particularly since it had been a
while since I'd updated it and there was a growing list of
suggestions for which I'd promised I'd make additions.
Big mistake.
The only response to this update was a raft of about 40 messages
from my two chief nitpickers, pointing out all the little
mistakes I'd made and the deficiencies in the wording of the new
entries, and one longer message from another correspondent who
had several suggestions and who did manage to stick in a few
words about how he'd particularly liked a couple of the new
entries (thanks, Stan!).
I'm not knocking the "two chief nitpickers," they're great people
and their feedback has been extremely important to the quality of
the list and I know that they're logical people who assume that
I'm a big boy now and don't need little pats on the head and
won't be the slightest bit disappointed in a 40:0 ratio of "this
needs fixing"'s to "this is nice"'s. Everybody knows, after all
(and I know this, too) that it's much easier to criticize than
to compliment, because stuff that's good doesn't need to be fixed
and so doesn't need to be mentioned.
I don't know if any of this answers Ed's question, and I'm sure
it isn't terribly encouraging to any fledgling FAQ list authors
out there, but at least it's off my chest now :-) .
Steve Summit
scs@eskimo.com
P.S. I'm not crying in my beer here, regardless of how this
sounds. Don't think you have to console me, such as for my
disappointment of a few months ago; I got over it, as I knew I
would, and in fact I'm already immersed in another major
update...
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