Hi Firefox. I cannot in all conscience fail to respond to your question(s) (Grin!)
I have attached an image of three rows from "Unanswered posts" in the first of FORTY pages of unanswered posts on a different board.

The first and third lines show announcements which are not questions, it is true, but tend not to generate much discussion. A vanilla announcement such as "Tomorrow is Friday" carries very little information content, and does not ask a question. These announcements tend to come from administrators or people whose main interest is in that particular third-party application.

The second line is an announcement by Yours Truly, in a programming language forum. At the time I had written some VBA code which I thought might be of interest to a few people, a contribution to the general pool of knowledge, or might cause someone to think "Hey! That might be a good thing to have in MY applications". And for much of the time, I use this particular BBS as a storage device so that I can easily find something if I have deleted or lost the copy from my system.

I think that unanswered posts is not a cause for alarm; but an unanswered question from within the last fortnight may deserve a second look. An unanswered question from a newcomer within the last day might deserve at the least a "Welcome Aboard!" response, just to let them know that their post is visible.



Sometimes I don't have a good answer to a question, but I will respond "I have had the same problem" just to let the poster know that they are not alone.

Cheers, Chris

Attached Images

Untitled.png (16.3 KB, 16 views)

Whether or not page upon page of unanswered posts is cause for alarm, is in the eyes of the beholder, I guess. However, surely it does beg two questions.
1) If 99% of all questions are likely to go unanswered, what purpose is the forum serving in the first place?
2) ... to return to my original question ... although any forum will undoubtedly contain some posts which are for information rather than interrogative purposes, the people who use those ( these ) forums to ask questions obviously do so because they need an answer - sometimes, urgently - and because they've presumably failed to find one elsewhere. Surely there must be an 'elsewhere' wherein these answers can in fact be found, not by guesswork or trial-and-error or endless and often fruitless hours of trawling Google, or even by employing workarounds, but by asking people who actually know the answers?

FF> Surely there must be an 'elsewhere' wherein these answers can in fact be found, not by guesswork or trial-and-error or endless and often fruitless hours of trawling Google, or even by employing workarounds, but by asking people who actually know the answers?


Firefox, I do agree with your concerns. For thirty-five years I have been posing questions and receiving answers through BBS networks, DOS-based and now Windows-based. Many of my questions have gone unanswered. That's Life.
I too am frustrated by failures in search engines; I put most failures down to my weird dialectic vocabularies (in the main Lancashire UK, Yilgarn Western Australia, and now Toronto and Newfoundland in Canada. That, too, is life.


The hours spent trawling Google (or whatever) are not, however, fruitless, as I think you will see. Take your favourite unanswered question, just one, and go looking for an answer, not just here, but wherever you think an answer might be found. When, if, you do find an answer elsewhere, add that BBS to your list of goto-places for answers.


Examples from my life abound: I am implementing Word2003/VBA applications that mine data from web pages. "Selenium" was recommended. My usual VBA haunts do not favour Selenium, but I found a site with excellent videos that got me started the first time out. A Miracle!
And herein lies a tale: If right now you search for "Selenium VBA" you will get hits. But if you search "YouTube selenium excel" you will immediately find the video of the UK firm who produce these (to me) excellent videos.

My failure in effecting searches lies mainly in my use of my mother tongue ("dialects" above). My early days in programming used "macro" to mean a compile-time action that expanded into source code to be compiled into an 80-column punched card object deck. Microsoft have popularized the use of Macro to mean "run-time procedure with no parameters", that is "a subroutine with no parameters".


Today? I have located a half-dozen BBS in which I search for answers in specific areas, and am usually satisfied with responses. There is a possibility that some unanswered posts are from people who expect one tool - Microsoft Office Forums - to solve every problem. I do not expect that of my carpentry tools, nor my gardening tools. Why should I expect any different from my online tools?


Perhaps you might identify a specific post in (I think) the Outlook Forum, and one or more of us might see what we can find. After all, if there really is no answer, then there really is no answer; but if several answers can be found elsewhere, then perhaps the original poster just didn't try hard enough?
Cheers, Chris