Suggestion for Town Halls

Please, please can we have the chance to submit our questions in advance, and book to be called on Skype if it is being used, so that when we do prepare in advance we actually get a good chance of having our questions asked , instead of being bombarded with more questions than there is time to answer them?

I sit for an hour and a half, patiently waiting for my Skype call, and got 'missed' even though I was one of the first to pass my Skype name over to be booked.

In the end, Philip 'answered' my question based on the very brief summary I had given when I booked my question in, but without the context of my whole question the answer I got actually bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I was wishing to ask.

I have now emailed the full text of my question to Philip in the hope of an answer, but I would please ask you to consider preparing in advance - no doubt there will be many people with similar questions that can be condensed into one. It would also have the advantage that answers could be prepared, rather than Philip giving "I'll find out" and "I'll look into it", which frankly are a bit of a waste of limited time.

On this occasion, the town hall was at a euro-friendly time so it is not the end of the world - but if it had been at the usual time which may be past midnight for me, wasting those hours in the hope I may get called is not really practical.

Lewis

Hi Lewis,

As you know, we're continuing to adapt and vary the format. Just several Town Halls ago, it was text-only, and now voice. We also used to take questions in advance in the forums, but there ended up being so many of them, and first-come-first-serve doesn't work well because of how many questions tend to be the same or repeated from past Town Halls (e.g., "When's Havok 2/3 coming? That's the longest running joke!).

We've also had some that were more planned (I remember a certain one where Cory took prepared questions) and some that were more spontaneous too. History:

http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Town_Hall_Logs

We've been consciously more Euro-friendly and unfortunately we can't get to everyone. That's becoming harder in this growing world! Nevertheless, thank you for your suggestion; we're going to continue to do new things and see what works best.