I've taken part in online forums since... hoo boy, I was using a dial up modem and had to constantly remind my wife not to pick up the phone while I was using the computer.  Man I'm old. Anyway...

I've asked a lot of questions over the years, and I've tried to answer them as well. I've been posting stuff here on SQL Server Central for over two decades now (see, old). Lately, I've been doing a lot of posting around amateur radio on various forums. Not to bring AI into it, but, I've found that the information available from AI when it comes to radios and how to make them work, is weak. Very weak in some cases (looking at you CoPilot). I don't know if that's because the information is too new for it to be a part of their models, or if the sites where the information can be found is too obscure, or what. However, the simple fact of the matter is, if you want information on radios, you may be required to ask someone for help, and the online forums are where you go to get it. Cool, right? Nope.

See, for whatever reason, a lot of people in these forums are obsessed. With answering questions? Nope. With two things. First, and foremost, gatekeeping. The question can be really innocuous like "Does this radio transmit on 1.25m?". The answer will inevitably be "What's your license? You know you can't transmit on 1.25m in Kenya!" Like that has anything to do with the question (and maybe the person is in Somalia, where you can). The other thing that will come up, over and over, is to answer the same question this way: "Well, if you'd read the manual, you'd know."

Both these make me want to pluck my eyebrow hairs out, one-by-one.

Generally speaking, we don't see much of that around here in our forums. Overall, we're a pretty helpful bunch. Yeah, we may ask a lot of follow-up questions, but really, we do try to simply help people, even if the same question has been asked 50 times before. Just as with my AI example earlier, search engines aren't trusted by a lot of people. For some good reasons and some bad, I get it. So, go somewhere to find experts and ask them rather than rely on possibly sketch answers from an AI or search engine.

EXCEPT THEY CAN'T GET THE ANSWER!!!

I think this is something we have to be really cautious about in online forums, but, let's be clear, in real life too. Very frequently, I know, because I do this, people don't listen to the full question, or don't listen well to the question. Then they proceed to answer what they think was asked, and it's wrong. Or, we decide rather than helping a person, they need a lecture on why, oh, I don't know, I'll pick on myself, why there's only one kind of execution plan, not two, in SQL Server.

Again, this is not directed at our online forums or any of you (although, we have done it), but rather, something to keep an eye on. I've always said, an expert is someone who is one page ahead of you in a book. So, we can all be experts at something that we know more than the person asking a question. So, let's remember that they're trying to learn or solve a problem, same as us.

Just answer the question!