CompuServe Messages

This very aspect of CIS — namely, that messages "scroll off" after a set amount of time and/or sufficient subsequent message traffic — that IMO makes CIS not as suitable for a technical support forum such as this one as it would otherwise be. GEnie demonstrates a viable alternative: messages there do NOT scroll off automatically, by time or by message count. (A Topic will _close_ automatically if the message count therein reaches 999, but that only prevents new messages from being posted until the Topic is cleaned so that the total message count is less than 999.) Sysops have to manually delete the older messages and clean the Topic. Usually, they archive messages that are of moderate or greater interest level first, placing the archive in the Library. This method has many advantages and few disadvantages. The primary disadvantage is that it's more work for the Sysops — but then, that's why they get paid and we pay. <grin> Seriously, any business would benefit from the policy of "if it's a choice between easier for us vs. easier for our customers, then we choose easier for our customers even if it means more work for us." (That's why GUIs are so popular — they're much harder to program, but easier for the end-users to use.) The advantages are numerous: because the Sysops can pick and choose which messages to delete in order to make more room, really important messages that provide long-term help for frequently-asked questions can be left in even after a cleaning. Eventually, the "meat" to "gristle" ratio of the Topics increase to near-100%. Likewise, they can choose what does or does not get archived. Messages like "Thanks for the answer! Did I ever tell you about the time I met President Bush? It was on a hot and humid summer day . . ." would just not get archived. Because important messages remain, the actual space used by the message board is less, because the same long answers to the same questions don't have to be answered over and over and OVER and over again and again and AGAIN and again every time someone new finds this place, or someone who's not so new happens to ask a question which he or she hasn't had to ask before, but which has been answered before. So, for instance, if someone asks, "I just got OS/2 2.1 and can't get 3DSr3 to network render under it using LANtastic 5!" (our own actual question a few weeks ago!), rather than post the same answer repeatedly (taking up lots of space and wasting online time for people who use CIM etc.), one could simply reply something like this: "That has already been answered in Category 12, Topic 31, Message 193. To read it, `SETcat 12' and then `REAd 31 193'." Much easier and much more efficient. The scrolling off of messages is an annoyance for something like, say, a comic book fandom forum, where business do not succeed or fail based on the timely availability of the information. For something like this, the only on-line technical support for a $3,000 program that businesses depend on for their continued existence, "annoyance" is a vast understatement. In our own case, we posted an important question a couple of months back, and then an ice-storm ravaged our area, knocking out both electrical and phone lines to our offices for a total of six days. By the time we were able to access Compuserve again, both our question and any answers to it had long since met the Saint Peter of the ASCII Afterlife, much to our chagrin. Had this forum been on GEnie, the messages would have still been there. I recommend that CompuServe either change the way it handles message overflow, or AutoDesk consider opening a branch of this forum on GEnie. We've invested way too much in 3DS and other Autodesk products to have to deal with evaporating messages in the sole technical support facility available to us (short of paying the price of the program again for the honored privilege of calling Autodesk on the phone).