Getting in Touch With Me

However, lately, it's becoming harder and harder to answer each and every message I receive through my Contact page or through the Talk Feature below each article personally. Although I try to convince people to send me only on-topic messages and redirect all other questions to forums like http://p2p.wrox.com/index.php?referrerid=385 and http://www.asp.net to keep my Inbox manageable, I still receive a lot of off-topic stuff.

With days of more than 4,000 unique visitors and sometimes 30 to 50 or more personal e-mails, I simply don't have the time to give all of you a friendly and useful personal answer anymore. So, instead of copying and pasting the same standard message over and over again, I decided to write this little post so I can simply refer people to this post instead.

So, if you're referred here, there's a fair chance you asked for something that I cannot answer, or that I don't want to answer. The following lists includes some of the topics I can no longer reply to:

• He, I run into error X35 under PHP when I try to connect to MySQL 4.1.5. Please help ASAP. URGENT
• He, look, I saw one of your posts on the Wrox forum and I need your help. Since I don't have the time to wait for a proper reply there or do some research myself, I am sending you this 10 page source document and hope you can figure it out. Can you help? It's urgent!!!
• Hi I am designing an application but I don't know where to start. Can you help?
• Hi Imra (note the spelling of my name, a nice personal touch to a personal message. Job agencies are very good at this). It is with great interest that I read you web site and your resume. I am sorry I ignored the part where you specifically asked me not to contact you for a job. Although your resume tells me not to contact you with a job offer, I am a bit stubborn and really believe that what I have to offer is so amazing that I have to contact you anyway. I can arrange for an appointment with a potential client this afternoon and you can start tomorrow if you're interested. Oh, BTW, we're the same company that you hired to find new employees. We'll let you know when we found one.
• Pleas send crack or serial for Office 2007.

If you have a public web site, I am sure you'll recognize some of this, and hopefully you understand. If you don't understand: tough luck.

So, what can you do to get an answer after all if you have a technical question? Do a Google search or consult forums like http://p2p.wrox.com or http://www.asp.net.

Please do feel free to get in touch with me for everything else related to my site, my books or me personally: questions you may have about my articles or books, bugs or other issues you find in my code, or general "how can I extend the ideas presented in article XYZ that you wrote" type of questions are more than welcome (although it would be better if you'd post those as a comment under each article).
Also, personal messages are of course very welcome too. It may take some time before you get an answer, but I try to answer each serious e-mail personally.