Hi Randy,

>I would suggest periodic surveys where subscribers indicate for each answer or tip, whether they read it, liked it, etc.

I think that has been suggested several time to Advisor, but it never worked, because evaluating and creating surveys takes too much time and people won't spend the time to answer them if they don't get anything free in return.

>So the issue gets down to which items to publish.

That's our responsibility. Each of us chooses the question to answer based on what we get submitted to Ask Advisor or we found on the internet somewhere and the asker gave us the permission to use this question for the column.

What questions we answer depends on a number of criteria. First of all, a question must be of general interest. This, unfortunately, rules out a lot of submitted question that are too specific. Second, we must be able to answer the question accuratly. And it should be a VFP question, or at least be usable in VFP, too. Because VFP is state of art and by now available in the third release, we long ago stopped publishing 2.x-only topics. My Y2K article was one big exception, as are articles on the Division by zero problem, or other current issues. If a question is asked over and over again, it's more likely that we cover it, because this shows us that there are still a number of people out there that don't know about this issue.

>The person is asking about the 2GB limitof VFP tables. A one sentence answer would do it, and I wouldn't have published it.

Yes, it would do, but this is actually a frequently asked question. Many people are not aware of this limit in VFP. And while you could answer this question in one sentence, our goal in Ask Advisor is to provide more information on each question, cover some related topics and explain why things are the way they are.

>But I find problems like this every month--many times in the feature articles as well. If the magazine is targeted at a lower level audience as you suggest, it is even more important to address the issue of the whether publsihed content is consistent with best practices.

This raises the question on how much comments a tip needs... What do you think?

Christof