Whenever someone ask a valid question, they are sanctomonoiusly hit with the archives BS.<p>Whenever, a really good debate develops or an interesting thread gets posted, some geek decides to police the forum and the threads gets deleted.<p>Yesterday, the person responsible for the "racing" section, begain bashing A4s and praising BMWs. While MZ's observations were completely valid, the forum police apprently decided otherwise and deleted these threads.<p>Currently, the most interesting threads concern music, BMW, and horns.<p>Candidly, hans' posts were more exciting than these insipid discussions.<p>Screw the archives. Truthfully, I bet every single topic that could ever possibly arrise has been beat into the ground. Who cares! People come to the Forum to chat and not to read archives.

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<br>Just to be consistent.<p>I am guilty as charged for sending people to the archives, will keep it in mind. I would prefer that more things like polls were put on the other sections. There isn't much activity on them, while this one fills out very quickly. It might only slow down this one a little bit, but it would add a lot of activity to the other ones.<p>Todd W

Doug, thank you for feeling my comments were valid, but please don't think I am bashing A4's. No way. I still like mine, and feel that I would still reccomend them to people, its just that for what I now want to do, it is no longer the car for me, unless the S4 can change my mind :)<p>But another problem I am having is in getting those who drag race, and have no skills with their car yet, to at least go to an AutoX OR a Driving School before they do so, and end up hurting people. This is dangerous.<p>Lastly, is my dual frustrations that my car is not competitive, nor does any other A4's come out to an AutoX so at least we could compete against each other for fun. I am the lone wolf in my area, except for Gary Allison, but then his car is modified to the hilt and there is no simularities there to judge by.

I agree that a 'net troll like Hans can be fun, up to a point. I also agree that yelling "ARCHIVES" at someone isn't particularly helpful. OTOH, I think it's perfectly legitimate to provide a fact or opinion and THEN point out that many more facts/opinions can be retrieved from the archives. Just as it's legitimate to refer someone seeking technical support to a user document page no. And finally, I disagree that every conceivable topic has already been beaten to death. Ones with a mostly factual "answer" are in the F.A.Q. But lots of others CHANGE OVER TIME (e.g., the "best" winter tires), and are therefore perfectly good topics to rehash periodically.<p>0.02 if ever there was...

I don't equate referring people to the archives with a lack of intelligent debate. I also don't equate a board like this with a 'chat room' and think it loses much of its appeal and value when it becomes one. There's nothing wrong with asking people to first do some basic research in the available archives to see what the collected wisdom has brought forth in the past. Then, after you've done your research, you can post and say that you've looked in the archives and either you didn't find what you want, still have a question, etc. But it gets a bit tiresome to read the same basic question & answer for the umpteenth time, when a simple search gets the information.<p>As to chat vs. discussion. Just my own personal experience, based on other boards/rooms: there is a difference, and the more a board devolves into a chat room, the more the mundane and dubiously relevant posts crop up, and the signal to noise ratio drops significantly. Just comparing what I see here now compared to a few months ago, I think the wonderful nuggets of really useful information are being overwhelmed by the trivial, or Hans (tedious but somewhat amusing). I'm not criticizing anyone else' taste or desire for what they want to read, just noting as I did to myself this week, that the content of the board today is not really the content that brought me here and led me to send in a check to keep things going.<p>So, one more vote for checking the archives or FAQs before you ask your question, then come visit us.

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