Why do you participate in newsgroups/fora?

So why do you want to get involved with answering other people's questions?

I do it mostly to improve my own skills because I will see things that I might run into myself down the road. In other words helping others helps me indirectly by improving my skill set.

From stackoverflow SQLMenace

• 1. Learning the answers to things I don't know.

  2. Enforcing/improving my knowledge of things I do know by teaching other people.

  From Mark Biek

• Badges and reputation, of course. Helping others is great, learning is even better, but in the end, it's badges and reputation.

  From Brad Tutterow

• I love doing it, and always have. I get two mains benefits. The first is the buzz of knowing I am helping out other people, as well as helping them become just as passionate about development as I am. The second is the chance to increase my own knowledge, which is never a bad thing!

  From Martin

• Here it's badges and reputation for some stuff but the desire to help others and gain an answer to my question for others.

  On things other than SO I find that the community can be important unless it's just to ask a single question before I vanish never to be seen there again.

  From Teifion

• Would be nice if you could pick more than one as the answers since Mark and Martin's answers are very similar

  From SQLMenace

• Like Martin and Mark, for me, answering questions has multiple benefits:

  1. It reinforces the information in my own head
  2. It allows me to experiment, to find the best way to verbalize the information
  3. It gives me sort of a "group-quid-pro-quo" feeling; I feel like if I help out enough on a website or in a forum, I'm more likely to receive help later if I need to ask; alternately, if I ask for help and receive it, I'm more likely to feel indebted to the site and hang around to see what help I can offer.

  Of course, having cool badges is nice too.

  From Adam V

• David Taylor identifies our "secret" driving forces in his book The Naked Leader, this includes the following :

  • A sense of personal power and mastery over others
  • A sense of personal pride and, importance
  • Reassurance of self-worth and recognition of efforts
  • Peer approval and acceptance

  I think some of them apply for our motivations for participating in this newsgroup.

  From David