John,
FWIW, I fully agree that we should tell the OP about netiquette HERE.
Sometimes we are a bit more curt than we should be but we SHOULD tell them.

--
Don Guillett
SalesAid Software
Granite Shoals, TX

"John Wilson" wrote in message
...
Harlan,

I guess I was being a little sanctimonious and in retrospect, it
would probably have been better not to post a reply at all.
Before writing this though, I had done a little homework and
noticed that this OP had *multiposted* back on June 30th.
Yes, this particular one was a *crosspost* as you pointed out.

My only goal was to to try to educate the OP on newsgroup
nettiquette for any subsequent posts that he might make. The
result of which, if he did heed the advice, would be to save
someone in the future from wasting time answering a post that
had already been answered.

If you check the .programming ng, you'll notice that Orlando
did, in fact, give the OP the direct link to Chip's "datedif"
page hours before you wasted whatever time it took you to
look it up and post it here.

Yes, there are some gray areas as to what is accepted ng
nettiquette and from your post, I can see that this is one of
them. Every once in a while someone jumps on the bandwagon
and we all lament on things that OP's do wrong in the ng's
and ways to solve it but I rarely see a concerted effort to do
anything about it.

Personally, most of the things that OP's do "wrong", including
posting attachments, doesn't bother me. Whenever I have
posted a message such as this, it was done for the "common
cause" (whatever that might be). I could, of course, have been
a little less sanctimonious though.

In the future, I'll just stick to answering whatever questions I'm
capable of in the ng's and not worry about trying to educate the
OP's on proper ng nettiquette.

Regards,
John