>Hence, people abandoning neighborhoods for "gated communitities" of "like-minded" individuals. Age old argument: do we allow "pirates" to drive civil people from the public arena, or do we stand our ground and demonstrate our principles in the face of discomfort and disagreement?
>
>JMHO
>
>...snip
>
>In the newsgroups, I don't generally have to scroll thru pages and pages of question/answer/question/answer to get to the absolutely thrilling message:
>"thanks" :-(
Nancy,

Interesting different view of things. For me I find that I am usually answering questions and carrying on conversations with people about a certain problem. The threaded system here in the UT is superb because as soon as I log in I go directly to the messages wating for me and deal with them. I can easily keep the conversations going with a 5 - 10 minute pass. With the newsgroups I have to search through everything that is new to find out if anyone has responded with another question on a thread I was involved with.

Yes I know I can put filters on my news reader, but then that prevents me from easily browsing all the threads if I so choose. The newsgroups have no archiving that I am aware of, so searching old message to see if a problem has already been addressed is not possible.

Because I do visit the Microsoft newsgroups for VFP I find anywhere from 1 to 15 unwanted messages in my email each day because someone hit the reply to sender instead of the reply to newsgroup.

Here in the UT you can reply to sender without going to Email and that, to me, is one major advantage.

In conversations I ahve had with a number of folks who spend a good deal of time answering questions, the single most common issue that comes up is "How long does it take me to log in, get the messages and get done with it?" This si because most of us are earning a living doing things other than free support for Visual Foxpro. We love VFP adn we love the idea of spreading the knowledge freely, but we still need to make a living.

I can cover the 2 compuserve fora and the UT in about 15-20 minutes twices a day. To make a single pass through the Microsoft VFP newsgroups it takes that long just to see if there is anything I can respond to, then there's the research time and writing the answers. It adds up fast. I just find the enwsgroups are horribly inefficient mechanisms for spreading knowledge.

I find the UT and Conmpuserve are very efficient at that very process.