Way way back, when Ask Al was still up and running...
How did the process work? Was it a collaboration? Just Al? And who got the wonderful job of sorting through all of the repetitious, already answered, and stupid questions to find the ones that were actually answerable?
Smegabyte *I bet y'all thought this would be about the return of Ask Al, didn't ya? HA! *
I sent the questions to Al, and he figured out what to do with them after that. So the THOUSANDS of questions that came in monthly (almost all of them non-usable by the time we shut down 2 years ago) really ate up a lot of time considering he wasn't able to even fulfill the 27 a month to answer!
When there were fresh questions about fresh projects, I think Al enjoyed reading them all and often had extra questions left over for the next month. But when the questions became so repetitive - many from fans who clearly couldn't be bothered to check weirdal.com and Ask Al for answers that were already there - Al decided that he needed to stop spending the time, in the middle of a tour no less, looking for questions that just weren't there.
When there's a new project and the opportunity for new questions and new answers, Al will consider bringing it back.
And no, a partial album with no release date, and a couple of shows at a fair are not enough to bring it back yet. In the last 2 years, I've seen only a few dozen questions in newsgroups and via email that might have been appropriate for Ask Al. I think he paused it at the right time, and when/if it returns, there'll be a fresh exchange of info again.
I admit it, you got me Smegabyte lol. I have to agree with you, Jon, in retrospect, I think it did dissapear at the right time. You guys had PLENTY to do on the road as it was.
I do appreciate everything you, Al, and the band have all done for us fans. I don't think I can ever thank you enough for your dedication.
One question though, if you saw duplicate questions, did you send them both to Al or delete one ahead of time?
Al got to see everything, so he fully understood the extent of the non-usable questions, which was essentially 99.9% by June, 2000.
It may not seem like 27 questions per month is a lot, but in the 21 months Ask Al was active, that's 567 questions answered!! I'm surprised there are that many topics available that aren't already covered on the site, but I'm not surprised the well ran dry. When there's new events to generate new questions, Al will look into restoring Ask Al.
yeah thanks alot bermuda. It was great to have Ask Al up, and since we cant have that, this is the next best thing, maybe even a little better b/c we dont have to wait a month for an answer.
but here's a question. i noticed that you mentioned it was hectic in the middle of a tour to answer questions, do you think you'll slow up answering questions when you go on tour again?
The hectic part has to do with scouring thousands of questions and not finding suitable ones. The album & tour were a year old by the time the good questions ran out, so it really wasn't just a matter of not having time, as much as that all the effort was just not yielding results: usable questions.
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