Ok wierd title i know but let me explain,
A forum is as the name suggests a place where people can come and discuss topics, the essence to that is gettign feedback, ideas suggestions and god willing a little argument and constructive advise..

Now not to sound a little critical but i have been a member of vb forums for at least 3- 4 years now i think, and i have noticed that there has been over the past 12 months a rapid decline in use and i personally attribute that to the moderators and some of the more advanced programmers amongst us.
What seems to be happening on nearly every thread is "Run a search for it", "search the forums" or "check the link in my signature its got a great tutorial". If people wanted to read a tutorial on the subject they would do, but they have come to a discussion forum because thats obviously how they want to learn the subject matter.

Now i remember not so long back the way it used to work was - someone would ask a question and they would get a reply similar to "i am working on something similar have you tried putting that into a class, i did and it worked great".. with someone else chipping in with "yeah and if you do this instead of that it may improve the preformace"..

It used to be healthy!! the junior members used to learn by instructing and discussiing with others of a similar level but as said above this doesnt happen anymore because higher members are jumping stright in with the first reply which just says "run a search on the forums" which kills off the discussion.

Now dont get me wrong the back posts are an amazing knowledge base of information that the whole forum has built up together, lets just try to get back to filling the knowledge base rather than refering to it!!.


Rob