I'm not so sure. The new users who come in via the forums may be ignorant of
Netiquette and totally clueless about how to ask questions, and they are
often very frustrated with Word by the time they arrive here, but for the
most part they are fairly timid and don't become generally abusive (if only
because they have so much trouble finding a specific thread again that they
don't hang around long enough). Where I see the highest level of incivility
is in threads in which the Word NGs are infected by cross-posting to NGs in
other product areas (where the level of civility is evidently not as high)
and especially to actual Usenet NGs (ones not on the msnews server), where a
more rough-and-ready posting style apparently obtains.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Amedee Van Gasse" wrote in message
...
Suzanne S. Barnhill shared this with us in
microsoft.public.word.newusers:

My impression, though, was that most of the incivility here was
coming in by way of Usenet and almost certainly from the orphaned
(and deprecated) microsoft.public.word.general. By "here" I meant "in
this thread," but when I switched to "Show All Messages," I was
surprised to discover that "this thread" was not the one I thought it
was, but the comment still applies: note that none of the
participants are @discussions.com.

Indeed, you ARE correct!
In this case... for every rule there are exceptions.

My personal observation is that in most other cases the incivility
comes from "relatively new" users (more than 1 year but less than 5
years of internet usage), and there is a higher probability for a "new
user" to be on a forum, not on usenet.

--
Amedee Van Gasse