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Submitted by Mark on
in

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We'd love to answer every management question we get, but we simply don't have the bandwidth. Please post your question in the most appropriate forum. If we answer questions by email, only the recipient gets to benefit from our answer.

That defeats part of the incredible value of belonging to the Manager Tools community. I call this the "learning from OTHERS' experiences" school. It works pretty well. "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." Why not others' bad judgment? ;-) Some of our answers come from OUR mistakes. Sometimes your situation is unique, and you want to explain in a long mail. Nevertheless, the forums allow you to make lengthy posts, and so we still recommend you post your question versus emailing us. We understand that you want us to know all the details. That's good - more details are ALWAYS better. [I admit to getting testy when someone asks a question with sketchy details, and then "critiques" my recommendation with more information. That's not cricket. - H]

Sometimes you need privacy. We respect that, but we recur to our earlier point about bandwidth. We're unlikely to respond. We ask that you consider posting under a different name, and taking out the (usually unnecessary) information which might reveal you as the source. We guarantee you, someone else will read your post and think of THEIR boss, or THEIR direct. Sometimes, I get 50 emails a day from members, all with long stories about legitimate concerns. I'm not going to slap an answer on these requests. We're talking about management here - people's well-being, careers, and self-respect are at stake. We might consider adding a premium service to allow this at some time in the future, but even with fair pricing, we have a fear that bandwidth could again become an issue.

Thanks for being a part of our community, and respecting this unique twist on the old Tragedy of the Commons paradigm.

Mark

aspiringceo's picture

Hi M+M

Maybe you could consider a "guest" forum wher we could post without reveling our true identity. Already ther are 1 or 2 questions I would love to throw out for discussion but as I've recommended this site to all my directs I would feel uncomfortable.

mauzenne's picture
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We're noodling on this one ... although I understand the need for anonymity sometimes, my long history of experience on the net (how long can that really be?) and on BBS' prior to that to that, is that, in general, anonymity can quickly go amok (some of the older denizens of the net will remember the phrase "You Own Your Own Words").

I'm sure we can achieve some balance though.

The real challenge, of course, is how to implement it on the forums ... not clear to me that we can without some custom code. Anyone with any relevant experience, please feel free to chime in! :-)

alyurek's picture

With your current setup, phpBB, implementing anonymous posting is easy. Simply in the forums admin pane. Not sure of the exact place but it is the part where you can add new topics forum sections. When you find that you can customize the permissions and allow people who aren't logged in to post.

The problem you'd run into by unlocking a specific area of the forums would be opening up that specific area to spammers. There are phpBB plugins to weed out spam messages which would solve that problem.

To achieve the next level of anonymity which would be tossing out the IP logs you would need some custom code but it would be simple. IP addresses are stored in the SQL DB and deleting them from that section exclusively would be easy to do with a small script.

shmuelik's picture

BS"D

Hi Mark and Mike
Great Show.
I'm a small business owner in Israel and you guys have helped me grow in my team leader abilities so much. Thank you.
I'm looking on your site for the forms that usually are coming with your shows but I don't remember in which show I have to search for. Since I'm listening to your show mainly on the iPod I cant get right away your forms to download.
Therefore did I miss that you might have all the forms (1 o 1, feedback etc.) on your site in one place?

Thanks for your help.

Shmuel from Jerusalem

HMac's picture

Aspiring:

Here's a simple solution people have used in the past:

Join M-T again, using a different name. Share only what details you need to in your post. You can even explain that you are a regular poster who's assumed a different "identity" for the purposes of this post (I remember others having done that too...).

-Hugh

Chris5va's picture

I have been listening to Manager Tools for more than 6 months and very much enjoy the valuable content discussed. I listen to podcasts (especially this one) on my way to and from work.

About a month ago my subscription to the Manager Tools podcast broke. I sent an e-mail to Zune asking them to look into fixing the link. I also tried to manually add the podcast to my Zune through the Zune software. When I do this it creates an error that tells me the podcast is not formatted in the correct format. Was there a change to the format of the podcasts that prevents Zune from recieving the podcast? Any help would be helpful. I really miss listening to this show.

mauzenne's picture
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Chris5va,

I'd love to know more so we can get this fixed for you ... do you have any more details (e.g., the specific error message) that you can provide?

What is the URL of the feed you're attempting to use?

thanks,
Mike

cinds's picture

M & M

I didn't really want to make this public, but do not seem to be getting a reply to my private message.

I work for an organisation that would like to download your podcasts onto our database for our managers to listen to.  Because of the nature of our organisation staff are restricted from using the internet.

I know that you have individual membership but I can not find a corporate membership.  We'd like to do the right thing and get permission from you guys to put some of your podcasts on our database.

- Cinds

mauzenne's picture
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Cinds,

Thanks for contacting us. You are correct; it would be a violation of our terms of use to host the casts on your corporate site.

Would love to figure out what we can do to help, however. Please send me an email (michael AT Manager-Tools DOT com) and I'd be more than happy to set-up some time to discuss.

Thanks again,
Mike