I love to help folks! Someone comes to me in person and I am excited to help them as much as I can. This site is a great resource even though it's not face-to-face, I have helped several folks and have been helped several times.
The problem is that when it comes to helping new guys on this site, I have no idea who's feeding me a line and who is a good guy in need of genuine help. How can I know if someone is really helping a blind girl, a disabled Vietnam vet, an 80 year old, a soldier just back from deployment, a cop who had to retire because he was shot on duty, a young kid who lost his dad last year, etc?
I've joked about it before but in all seriousness, how can we really know?
I think the answer for me has to be 1) preparation and 2) posts/messages. We all know whether we drew a tag months ago, so if someone (even a newbie) starts asking for help in June, I'm all about it! There have been several like this and people are great about helping those guys. As far as help requests at the last minute, someone with 3 messages has earned about 3 words of advice (the website offered earlier in the thread is a perfect example of the help that I would offer). Someone with 1300 messages will get a lot more specific advice from me, even if they are coming in with 5 days to go before their hunt. (of course I am from Oregon so no one really wants my advice anyway, haha!)
Just been thinking about this the last few days and those are my musings, for what they are worth.
