>>I do disagree on one point though - I think you'll find that this isn't a community, rather a small clique of self-appointed experts who tolerate outsiders looking in, as long as they don't express opinions at variance with their own.
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>Examples?
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>>The "inner sanctum" do not have to give explanations for their opinions, they are holy truths.
>>
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>Examples?
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>>The whole group has the air of a fanatical religious sect, blindly worshipping Foxpro,
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>Examples?
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>> with a small group of high priests, whose proclaimations must be accepted as god-given truths & questioning those words is tantamount to blasphemy.
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>Examples?
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>FWIW, I have been participating in the UT community for about 3.5 years now, so have had lots of time to observe, and I have to disagree with most of your statements here. I do agree that there are a couple of people here that get hostile if you disagree with them, and there are a couple of others that will quickly dismiss you as ignorant if you disagree with them, but the majority of people are just developers like you who might have enough experience to help you through a problem because they've been there.
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>Your characterization of this community as exclusive is unfair, and IMO inaccurate. I am close friends with a few of the well-known names here, but there are just as many that I am not friends with, and even a few that I don't even like. Similarly, there are lots of people in the VFP community that are relatively unknown that I acknowledge as real experts.
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>Most 'experts' and 'gurus' here are not 'self-appointed'. If they hold a status, it was most likely bestowed upon them by a community appreciative of their knowledge of the subject matter and their willingness to give.
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>Some gurus have more patience than others... if you have spent a half hour or more per work day answering VFP questions, it's sometimes easy to forget how to put yourself in the asker's shoes. People that ask questions before looking in the help file, or ask others to do their work for them, or show a complete lack of willingness to learn on their own can be peeves. And all of us have bad days (some have more bad days than others).
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>A helpful hint- don't look at the letters after anyone's name to determine their expert status, look at the content of their posts. You may or may not find a correlation.

< *Standing Ovation* >

A couple of things have bothered me about this thread. One is the expectation of others towards the "gurus". Frankly, I don't know of any that willingly and knowingly give out what they consider to be "bad advice". After all, you don't get to that position (much less to MVP status) that way. However, some people seem to think that because we may provide a snippet of code, or even a file, it's somehow our responsibility to make that code or snippet fit their problem. For myself, I try to point folks in the right direction. If someone disagrees with some opinion, there's not much I can do about it. I do consider arguments that run contrary to my opinion based strictly on their merit. If they fail in that regard, I reject them. To call someone "close minded" makes the assumption that the argument was never fully considered. While I can speak only for myself, what I've seen in other MVPs indicates to me that they take pains in evaluating contrary POVs carefully before responding.

The other thing that's been said here that bothers me terribly is the notion that we blindly follow FoxPro. From the other MVPs I know, this is anything but the case. Certainly there is a preference, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if Fox dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow every Fox MVP would simply move on to another environment, and, in all likelihood become as proficient in it as they were in Fox.

Just my dime.