>I think it is unfair that Walter was banned from LE (aka UT).
>First, Walter was simply defending himself from Mike’s attacks and insults.
>Second. Walter’s contribution to this forum was/is very useful/helpful and constructive.
>Note that Walter and I had many political disagreements and clashes over the years (since politically we are 180 deg apart) But it does not take away from his technical knowledge and contribution to this forum.
>So, IMHO, banning Walter is unfair and wrong.

Walter has a bigger need to have the last word aka post on any topic he is a bit interested in than most (nearly all) people here. And yes, on technical merit for me he was one of the posters I might gain more than from others. On SQL questions we have Kevin and a few others where the answer reflects best practices already battle tested - something I often agree with and if not chances are that I am not on the up-and-up on current best practices and we have Naomi, who will ferret out articles fitting to the topic, offering a shortcut and often peer reviewed way to learn. With Walter, his solutions sometimes were surprizing and needed second or even third reading, but offered new perspective outside "best practices".
>
>About Mike. I was pretty much quiet until he started insulting women. It was wrong.

I will not argue on the merit and tone of most of his posts this year (I am tryíng to cultivate British understatement as a chracter trait). But till a few years ago Mike was one of the very few furthering "vfp knowledge" via his tendency to always measure effects of different codings.

In Fox it was established common knowledge and best practice to have indices on deleted and other low selectivity columns. Yes, I also had found a few instances where such indices did not help, but hinder. I just shrugged it off to special circumstances - but Mike took such observation, measured more and the index on low selectivity columns dropped out of best practice - until these things percolated up to Calvin and cohorts and we gained BINARY index.

So I would love to have them back here - Walter on the condition he always has to flip a coin to decide if he is allowed a third or later response on same topic, Mike in the frame of mind he was in a couple of dog lives ago.

>One thing that Mike said correctly is that I do ask “dumbest questions.” He opened my eyes.
>I thought that I was in the top 1% of the gurus in this forum. And that everything Tamar and Sergey learned about VFP was from me :)

Before we all sing Kumbaya ( I saw your smiley!), let me fine tune Mikes observation a bit. When you arrived here, your questions were at least well formulated, describing scenario, already tried own attempts, main points of pain in a clear way. This was your super power, allowing often answers with pinpoint accuracy. Made you IMO one of the smartest and most considerate questioneers here: smart enough not to find a solution yourself but ask first, but considerate enough not to force the 4 to 12 people trying to answer to spend time visualizing the problem or concentrating on already tried options. Your questions in the last years do not really show much of that super power ;-)