Courtesy and helpfulness

I think your comments are right on target.

As for the replies, forum contributors seem to appreciate it when those asking questions make an effort to do their homework and eliminate the easy/obvious solutions before posting.

When I need help, I do the following in order:

- Look at the tractor and try to figure it out myself.

- Look at the service, parts, and operator's manuals.

- At this point, I would ask my local friends. But since I don't know anyone around here who knows tractors better than I (and that's awfully scary!), I can't.

- At this point, I would call my local dealer for advice. Unfortunately, he's a moron, so there's no use in trying that. :-(

- Look at the tractor again and try to figure it out myself.

- Check the archives on the YT site to see if my question's been answered sometime in the past.

- Post a question on the forum. When posting, I:

1 - Use a descriptive subject; for example, "Source for 300 Utility Dipstick Felt Washer" instead of "Water Pump" or "Super C."

2 - Use standard English. (Not only for efficient communications, but also out of courtesy to the readers.)

3 - Thank those who help and who tried, either before the fact or afterward.

It's worked well so far. It's easy to save a lot of time, money, and aggravation -- and learn a lot -- by using the forum.

Mark W. in MI

I realize repeat questions are a bit hard to deal with. Probably the most of us are not the fastest typers in the world, thus answering question does take a bit of time, then have to repeat it two days later, while the last thread is still on the 12-15 pages of exposed discussion. It can try ones patience.

On the other side of this, we have a few folks come here, they never read discussion, current or old, never even look at the YT menu, then boldly anounce, "I'M HERE, ANSWER MY QUESTIONS". Deep down inside you know they're too damn lazy to even read enough to figure out if John Doe's question might have been exactly same as theirs.

I've been around here close to 8 years. When I first came a vast number of folks would start their post by apologizing for it being so long, yet didn't give enough information to get a good answer. I along with a few others, got heavily on the cases of those folks, pointing out to them, smetimes it just takes those few extra words to describe the problem. I'm happy to report, that problem is much improved over 8 years ago. Very rarely anymore do you see guys start a thread by apologizing.

So you see Len, we are improving, this works because we are a group with common interests. I'll bet if we had an English grammer specialist come in here and test us yearly, we are improving, and as a group, we are much better communicators than we were 5 years ago.

jimmy

It bothers me that he thinks I, and others, might actually do his research for him. It also annoys me that he displaced one decent topic off the first page.

One of my responces to such a request was to ask whether his mother still wipes his butt. I am not going to apoligise for that remark.

Why can't forum members use paragraphs? It makes reading alot easier. We all make grammatical errors and I have a few misspellings in my previous post. My misspellings are flagged by my computer. After four or five attempts to remove the error (apoligise) with no success, I just give up. But paragraphs are so easy to create.