John,

>I thought we were talking about an award for providing technical support to on-line communities.

Included in my description was "...support their products". That means providing technical support to online communities.

>The above sounds more like a Beta programme or Loyalty scheme. Apart from anything else, it is not really consistent with MS's earlier decision to phase the MVP programme out... and I don't remember receiving inside info via that means. Actually from memory the VFP MVP forum was hardly used.

I believe you also said that you were basing your comments on the way things were in 1996. I suspect that some things have changed since then.

I have no desire to tit for tat debate you on this. I was simply pointing out that Microsoft has good reasons for a private MVP area and good reasons to keep private the details of how things work behind the scenes. That's just good business sense, and I don't have any problem with the concept at all.