People writing to forums are sometimes very odd.

I came today across a post where the poster felt compelled to tell us that it was his second post to that forum. How that is relevant to any question is beyond me.

That on the other hand is fairly rare.

What is more common are the people who write at the bottom of their posts "please help me!" or even the more strident "PLEASE HELP ME!!!!!!". Do they really think that this line makes the people who spend some of their free time answering other peoples questions more likely to answer just this one? If so, they are wrong.

Finally there are the relatively few people who write that their own question is "Urgent!" - usually in the subject and often also in the text. Well that is a real turn-off as when you look at the questions there is NEVER anything there that is any more urgent than any other forum question. (Even if there is, the forums are not the place to post urgent questions - instead they should take the risk of being forced to pay and call Microsoft Customer Support Services [if that's this week's name]) with their problem).

Luckily in the forums I can do something I can't do in the equivalent newsgroups and edit the subject lines. Usually I do this when someone posts a question in say the Workflow forum that has a Subject of "Workflow" which doesn't help people scanning that forum to see if there is something they can answer, so I change the subject to better reflect the question put, but I can also use that possibility to get rid of all "Urgent"s from the Subject.