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> Chatting is having to write the same thing a million times.

If you find yourself repeating the same thing a lot in chat, it would be a good idea to document it somewhere and just paste a link. With a link to the relevant documentation, a lot of people will just do the rest of the legwork on their own, and will now be able to quickly reference it going forward, and hopefully bug you less in chat (you can always be explicit and refuse to answer people, asking them to read the docs instead).

If you find you're pasting too many links too frequently, then it's time to make an FAQ with those links, and start linking to that.



The problem is though, that some people like to be the local expert on IRC/Slack with all the answers. They don't want to document it elsewhere.


Then that person is doing all the legwork, but someone else can come along and create a KB themselves with those answers.


Fix your group's culture. Document things. If people refuse to document things, then do it for them and shove your docs in their face. Do it until they write the documentation themselves.


> Fix your group's culture.

Culture-change is about the hardest thing to achieve.


It's also the most important thing. If your culture is bad, changing what tool you use isn't going to fix everything. You're just going to have a new tool everyone uses poorly.


Could clever chatbots help there? Might be hard to avoid being intrusive though.




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