Hey Guys!

We are back with the Thursday Forum Best Practices where we discuss about a feature or practice on how you can best utilize MSDN/TechNet Forums.

Today's blog post topic is inspired from our weekly blog posting theme Tuesday Featured Post that was published on a topic Tuesday Featured Post: An Example of Community Discussion.

What makes the above blog post is great is that it talks about a forum post that got 168 replies! In this blog post we will discuss the practices that Original Poster is used in that forum post that leads to this many replies.

The OP started the post with a question detailing about re-writing a program that was developed 25 years ago and shares a variety of choices that OP explored for this re-development process and what concern does OP has regarding selecting this new technologies. If you read closely the details in the question section, you will notice that how much OP is grateful and humble to the community members. And OP know that these details are the necessary information for community members to give feedback about the issue.

One thing you will notice is that the answers in this thread has a details explanation about the solution that community members is providing and their pros and cons. Not only this but also they are  making a time to find a test data by themselves  for providing the solution. There are rare forum post that you will see have these types of efforts and answers with this great explanations and this is one of them. This is achieved in this forum post is because OP is very kind and polite to the community member by appreciating all the answers and then replying that OP is trying all the solutions and making decision which way approach.

Let's see some of the politeness and appreciation from the OP to community members. How Original Poster is thanking one of the answerers. OP explicitly bolded the word "excellent",

"Thank you very much for the excellent explanation and the encouragement to go forward."

Like other forum posts answerers of this thread also expects an update from the OP whether the provided solution worked or not. So, not seeing any update for couple of days from OP one of the answerers followed up about the status of the issue. Here's how OP replies why OP was not able to give the update,

"Apologies for the delay but a winter cold has wiped me out for a couple of days."

From the above replies it shows that how kind and appreciating OP is to the community members for helping out to finding a solution. This is a great example of how politeness and kindness can lead to a great collaboration. An make others to make some time for you from their busy life.

I hope that this post helps and see you on the next one.

Thank You,
-Ninja Sabah