I believe the annoyance was more with the people who answered your question without bothering to see if anybody had posted a previous (correct) answer. Your question was trivial (and, in all fairness, could have been answered by simply looking at the API or picking up a book like David Flanagan's "Java In A Nutshell, 4th ed." (which every Java programmer should have), and I think there were 12-15 answers (I was guilty as well, though I mistakenly thought I was on the struts-user list).
In short, you will get more people annoyed by asking trivial questions that are easily answered by some cursory research than asking off-topic questions. There have actually been some very good OT discussion on this list over the years (I remember a discussion on design patterns that lasted for days one year). In other words, intelligent, interesting discussion is tolerated even if the topic is only marginally related to servlets. Of cource, Milt will probably disagree with me...he does on everything else. ;-) Mark -----Original Message----- From: Mike Cronin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 2:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Off Topic: Just a suggestion... Hi all, I kept my trap shut yesterday after getting my butt chewed by responding to an off topic question regarding date handling. I understand that this board exists specifically for servlets and that we should keep the off topic issues to a minimum, but after reviewing 20 posts of off topic, unhelpful and offhanded comments this morning, I feel we should stick to answering any question presented with as little overhead (i.e. slams and/or digs) as possible. Even when the post is off topic, let's see if we can get an answer to that programmer and move on. Thanks much, Mike Cronin ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff SERVLET-INTEREST". Archives: http://archives.java.sun.com/archives/servlet-interest.html Resources: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/external-resources.html LISTSERV Help: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/user/user.html ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff SERVLET-INTEREST". Archives: http://archives.java.sun.com/archives/servlet-interest.html Resources: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/external-resources.html LISTSERV Help: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/user/user.html
