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?