>I had hoped to have finished with this, but ...
>
>There seem to be lots of "experts" & people who have been around a long time, who keep telling me that it's wonderful here & I'm mistaken. As always - those that are part of the problem, denying there is a problem.
>
>It would be interesting to hear the views of anyone else who has been here for around as long as I have, i.e. not long. Am I wrong in feeling that the place is very cliquey, not so welcoming to newcomers & intolerant of views that do not match those of the "inner sanctum".

I probably qualify to reply - only been around a little longer than you. And I fully agree with what you say. I've just posted the following to John Petersen, my apologies if you've already read it :


I spend a lot less time here now, following the amount of abuse I received from one MVP for pointing out a potential serious fault with a piece of code he posted. It was a routine that checked validity of filenames, the typo's I could live with, but it had the possible side-effect of deleting any existing file with the same name. I thought this was serious enough to warn the recipient about. The amount of abuse I received was intolerable - and I see the particular MVP is still about & boasting about upsetting people (Ed Rauh, if you couldn't guess).


I also received a severe berating from several experts including George Tasker, for suggesting a different method of working to what he likes.

While they may be very good at what they do, & the help they give is often very useful, the seem very fixed in their minds about how things should be done & very unwilling to even consider that their may be other ways of doing things. If there were only one fixed way of doing things then no advances would be made, and just because something has been tried & found not to work under one set of conditions does not mean that it wont work under different conditions. So the mind should stay open to ALL possibilities & accept the possibility that a suggestion that comes from a novice may be better than your own way of doing something (which is 100% guaranteed to work).

It seems that some of the experts are stuck with the view that their methodology always works, so that's the way it should always be done. They ma be right & they may keep on making money doing it that way, but the ones who will always be the biggest winners are the ones prepared to take a risk on something new. Some will also be losers too, just depends on how you view life.