Generally speaking, there are three kinds of people that respond to
Usenet questions:
1) Almost professional responders, like MVP's, who spend a great deal
of time fielding questions, and who take great pride in giving
accurate, appropriate and clear responses, rarely make mistakes, and
always apologize if they do.
2) People with a lot of personal experience with the technology
addressed in the group or forum, and also sufficiently experienced in
the Usenet and forums to have learned not to get in over their heads,
and to carefully read the question before posting a response.
They may even wait a day or two to be see if someone better qualified
posts one before posting their own if they are less than 100%
confident it is accurate and informative. These people have been
there, done that, and genuinely take pleasure helping others but are
smart enough to know they should be sure that their response is not
only accurate, but addresses the problem, or if they are not sure, to
qualify the response or ask for more info from the OP.
3) People for whatever reason - could be anything ranging from
enjoying putting someone else down, to boredom, to egomania, who never
give specific or targeted answers to the questions posed. Their
replies offer no assistance, do not provide information, guidance, or
links to *appropriate* sites for further assistance with the OP's
problem. They are generalized, vague, negative, offering absolutely no
assistance with the technical difficulty in question. They not only
provide no value, they lessen the OP's chance of getting a useful
response by padding out the thread.
Worst of all, just about invariably, they don't even carefully read
the OP's post before hammering away at the keyboard! They parse out a
few words, like 'shareware' and 'runtime', then make nonsensical
accusations about 'installing Access runtime as if it was shareware'
in response to a question about a shareware program distributed with
Access runtime.
