Ben Roy

It's funny, if you spend time on message boards for just about any hobby, sport, craft, job, or anything else you can imagine, you'll see the exact same thing happening: a few basic questions are asked over and over. They tend to be the most basic of questions, asked by new visitors to the site.

Depending on the community, these repeated questions are met with a variety of responses, from derision and ridicule to patience and understanding. In most cases, they do get answered in one form or another, and the newbies graduate to harder questions and more advanced topics.

The interesting and beneficial side effect of these repeating questions is that they provide the perfect avenue for newer members to contribute to the community. The normal feeling is to be intimidated when you don't know much about something, and a hesitancy to teach goes right along with it.

But when you take those neophytes and put them in an environment where they see the same basic questions being asked over and over, and the senior members perhaps growing tired of answering them all the time, it creates an ideal opportunity to jump in and give back. Besides sustaining the community, it establishes a behavior of giving back rather than just lurking.

Communities thrive because people contribute, and people contribute because they feel that they are helping others out. Fostering this healthy behavior builds the community, and ensures that it will continue to grow in the future.

So the next time you're getting ready to chew someone out for re-asking those same questions, remember that it might just be the opportunity needed to catapult another new member into being a full-fledged, contributing member of the community.