A couple of thoughts on forums and answering questions

I realised early this morning that there's something that gets me about answers to many forum questions. Let's not go into the inability of many forum posters to use grammar or sentence structure, that's a rant for another day.

It's about the responder and how they phrase their knowledge. It's apparently quite difficult as an 'expert' to select language which is usable by the person who posed the question. Is elegance or eloquence really that difficult?

Am I being snobbish about this? Maybe arrogant? Probably. I didn't really understand this a couple of years ago, but the relevance of a post defines its usefulness. Seems obvious. Is ignored a lot of the time.

There's a lot of "look how cool I am!" on the boards, all over the 'net; there's the "I registered here to diss x", the "I've been doing this for years" and the tenth thread in a week about the same subject. Sometimes the forum software makes it really hard to find the old threads, but most of the time someone's just not reading. Mp3car is a great example of baptism by fire - if you don't read up on the subject first, you will be flamed. Now is this good? Or is it just a case of "I have such superior knowledge on this topic and feel the need to share it" or "I'm so good it hurts"? I guess what really irritates is the implication "I'm great, I've been doing this since forever" without evidence. There's ample options for providing it, and I think I'm personally looking for proven authenticity, even if it's not really possible in this online day and age. Then there are those who have fantastic skills and ideas - but the sheer volume of ideas prevents them from finishing stuff. Still, it's also obvious they're trying hard to improve and are willing to share their knowledge and experience. I like this very much.

I'm also guilty of showing off - but I'm learning. I suspect part of the reason I try hard not to any more is that this is the way we have to deal with reality at work - if someone doesn't get value directly out of the content, the content is per se wasting their time. That's quite a nice maxim to work to, I think. Minimum fluff, maximum usage.