Once again I will ask for you to reflect on this issue and provide your suggestions and or comments. It is your community.
Alright here it comes:
There's a certain level of knowledge most of the people with over 100 posts (the vectorites) have about for instance installing VL, using slapt-get / gslapt, system administration. It gets very different when the problems get more specific. For instance, I couldn't help somebody setup his/her (wireless) network or connect to wifi with WEP/WPA. I don't know squat about the insides of vl-hot, it just works for me. Installing printers, Ati drivers, the list of things I don't know how to do goes on and on.
However there are certain things I do know, stuff about audio and specific problems I've encountered myself.
I'm pretty sure none of us know everything, and we don't need to. As a community, we're able to help each other with helping others. I have some knowledge others might not have, and others have good understanding of stuff that's like magic to me. Together we're pretty able to help a lot of the users.
I for one can't justify people paying for my "tech support". I guess, I don't answer posts I don't feel like answering and my understanding of Linux is mediocre at best. But it's alright here, there's no pressure. And if I screw up, there's a big chance somebody else will suggest something that does work.
I'm not sure why others haven't taken the offer, but I can tell you some of my reasons:
- If I payed for techsupport I'd be pretty pissed-off to find out you can get better help at a free forum.
- I do my best here at the forum, there's no way I could help better somewhere else.
- It seems unfair to ask money for help I give here for free.
- I don't want to be responsible for tech support. If I have a busy week or just a bad day nobody will miss me here.
- I honestly don't see how some prepaid tech support could help better than what we try to do here.
I'm sorry, this is probably not what you want to hear. It's the best I can do.