>>What in fact is the purpose of a Chatter area within the VFP Forum? Who may use it and under what conditions?
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>When its VFP related and does not fall into the other sections of the forum, like some of the VFP news that we've been getting lately (management and marketing decisions at MS, things about clients and stuff like that).
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>Its in the rules, or docuemented somewhere. You should be able to find the answer your self.

Hey, we're all programmers here, the last people to read the manuals. Well, traditionally at least. Still, many of us have read the UT rules years ago, and if a change of policy happened meanwhile, at some point when one was absent, you surely don't expect everyone to re-read the docs after each vacation.

As to the purpose of non-VFP related stuff, speaking from experience, forums like this, where people virtually know each other (or know each other virtually), are the best source of information at times like this. Knowing better, I don't trust CNN at all, they have a very bad history of twisting (or even manufacturing) the information; peer groups, however, do suffer from occasional appearance of unchecked information, urban legend taken at face value, but these things are easily and quickly corrected. OTOH, they have the benefit of speed - they don't have editorial staff, organization, nothing. At some point, I was the primary source of information for my area, just because I was online, and getting news from peer groups, minute by minute.