I am curious to know why blog site visitors stop short of actually registering for Free membership, so I thought I’d create a quick poll to find out a little more, as answers to all these concerns are explained on the Home and Privacy Policy pages:
Loading ...I will use the results of the poll to improve the blog site.
Thanks in advance…………….Phil
Free membership gives you access to the SAS Skills Discussion Forum for non-programming questions about SAS. Programming and Recruiter memberships, which require monthly low-cost subscriptions, give you access to the same forum and to the SAS Programming Forum, where you can ask SAS programming questions. However, all questions and answers are visible to all members with access to each forum, which may not be quite what you are looking for.
To fulfill any need for confidential correspondence you may have seen a recent addition to the blog menu. The Premium SAS help desk service, called [sas.answers @ Holland Numerics] (which has actually been around since 2002), is different. It does not require even Free membership of the blog, but it does require a separate subscription payable using PayPal. What makes this service special is that it provides an in-house web-based interface for you to ask questions, which automatically generates an SMS message and an email to Holland Numerics, with a copy of the email sent back to you too. There is also a service level agreement to provide an answer to every question within 48 hours, and that answer will be privately sent directly back to the sending subscriber! Please note that, if a monthly subscription is not necessary, then a single question can be asked instead for a reduced fee.
Full details of the [sas.answers @ Holland Numerics] help desk service can be found here.
It is rather sad that everyone knows the price of everything and the value of nothing! I have paraphrased this statement somewhat from the original written by Oscar Wilde for Lord Darlington in “Lady Windemere’s Fan”, but the reality is very much in evidence everywhere today. But how is that relevant to the SAS Programming Forum?
I wanted to create a place where students of SAS programming (which includes myself, as I try to learn something new about SAS every day) could ask SAS-related questions, even if they were from interviews or homework, without being criticised. However, I wanted to exclude those asking questions because they were too lazy to research the answers themselves (#LAZYWEB), so I hoped that charging a small amount to access the forum would filter out those trying to get free information with no effort, but encourage those enthusiastic enough to pay to learn about SAS an opportunity to do so. The SAS Programming Forum subscription is only GBP 5.00 per month for up to 3 months via PayPal, so it can be stopped at any time, but also renewed easily, and includes access to my SAS course about SAS programming topics, which I’m progressively building, and currently includes 4 sections on SAS components, Data Steps, PROC SQL and SAS macros, and now totals 25 topics in all. The sections are intended to be read sequentially, but are, for the most part, independent of each other. The key feature of the SAS Programming Forum and the SAS course is that questions can be asked at any time and they will be answered, provided sufficient information is given in the question. This is not a “get out” clause, but a learning point for all prospective SAS programmers that without sufficient information you cannot write a SAS program that meets the customer’s needs, so you have to be able to ask question yourself!
This is quick reminder that I still have the following apps available in Google Play:
These apps are also available for Android users in the Amazon Appstore, or for Chrome and Chromium desktop browser users in the Chrome Web Store:
There are also free apps, which you can find by searching in each app store:
All these apps are updated frequently, and the paid-for apps are priced at less than US$3 based on the number of questions that are answered, and within the apps you can ask new questions that can be added in future updates. It doesn’t matter which platform you use, as the same content is present in the corresponding Google Play, Amazon Appstore and Chrome Web Store apps.
