response 26 of 126:

Jun 20 21:56 UTC 1995

heh, I remember my first bbs responce.  ANyway, robh is a great helper.
I have decided to help out too.  I will have the help flag on every
minute that I am on grex (unless I am REALLY busy) and for all teh regular
grex users who check the users lists (who finger users w etc.) know I'm
on grex a whole lot.  Also, I'd like to add, I would of been a grex helper
about a month or so earlier, but i didnt' know hwo to turn the help flag, 
on, and i wouldnt' ask anyone, cuz then it would be kinda stupid to not
know how to be a helper, but want to be one. (understand that?)  It wasn't
until i accidentally read the manual pages on mesg that i realized
how to turn the flag on.  
Also, I like helping users out for teh fowling reasons:
1.  It makes others think grex is a wonderful place (which it is)
2.  I like to help other people out.
3.  Being a helper is a wonderful way to meet all sorts of new people.
4.  hold on, a helper just wrote me =)
5.  and finally, i knew how frustrating things were when i first got on
grex, and i had never heard of bbs, unix or anything before

response 28 of 126:

Jul 11 16:15 UTC 1995

Not much. Enough to set the flag. We discussed criteria somewhere once
(maybe even here?) and the default-concensus was that there would be
no criteria (a default-concensus is not a concensus, but what happens
when people get tired of discussing the matter - nothing). The real
question is, when does a helper decide that she/he can't answer enough
questions, and quits? Some probably should quit, but don't. I keep my
helper flag on, and find I can answer *most* questions about Grex, but
I am a dummy about scripting...and party (which I refer to others).
By the way, I had to ask how fix it so that my helper flag turned off
when I left conf....would you have told me to figure it out myself,
Valerie? [Actually, I approve of your responses, Valerie, but one gets
a reputation as being hard-nosed that way...welcome to the club - we
need more discipline in our lives.]

response 30 of 126:

Jul 11 23:06 UTC 1995

IMHO, you should know as much about Grex as you can, and you
should know how to refer a help-seeker when you haven't got
a clue.

(And yes, if you don't know how to automatically set your help
flag every time you log on, you probably shouldn't be a helper.  >8)

response 32 of 126:

Jul 12 02:49 UTC 1995

A lot of the help-seeker questions I get need less knowledge than editing
a script file.  In that situation I definitely would not have (and of
course could not have without root access) gone in and done it for him. 
But I would have told him what to do and why it would work.  That would at
least let him know enough about a few things that he'd be more helpful to
someone in the future.  

response 34 of 126:

Jul 23 19:21 UTC 1995

 Done. I wrote tinman and asked him to tell me his problem, and I would try
to help.

response 44 of 126:

Aug 18 03:37 UTC 1995

90% of the times I log on, noone has a help flag on (I run finger in my
.login). The idea of write help is to handle the question when it was
asked, not later by mail. How about getting more users to turn on their
help flags. (This is something the we-hope-is-coming newsletter canhelp
promote - having the appeal in writing in an article in a newsletter is
more likely to catch users' interest than a response in agora (I tested
the latter, and it didn't seem to have any effect). 

response 46 of 126:

Aug 18 10:56 UTC 1995

I stopped permitting writes (before "write help" came up) when I found that
the vast majority of writes I got were people who wanted to chat but
didn't actually have anything to say.  (There was an earlier time when
that wasn't true.)  I don't have any ideas about what would make *me*
put up with so many useless interruptions from strangers, much less how
to encourage anyone else.  Or does having your help flag set somehow
discourage people who *don't* want help from writing you?

response 48 of 126:

Aug 19 04:55 UTC 1995

That's usually when I'm on in the evening...but more are needed.

I would say that one in fifty, or fewer, write-helps that I receive
are looking to chat. My first greeting is always "Hi, how may I
help you?" I almost always get a question, not an effort to chat.