1) Someone who comes on asking for advice on buying a decent grill on a budget. They get lots of good suggestions, from a variety of knowledgeable posters, all which meet their budget. They then later post that they went to B&Q or Homebase and bought a piece of crap that you know isn’t going to make it through the summer. Why did they post asking for advice in the first time? I’m not sure.
2) Someone who posts that they are planning to do something difficult and creative, such as design and build their own smoker from scratch, or build a custom control box. They big up what their plans are, before later posting a question asking something absolutely fundemental. It is then that you realise that *they* are not designing anything, they expect the forum to do it for them. It is typical of this kind of poster that any attempt to answer their initial question will either (a) lead to further fundamental questions (b) see them then argue that your advice is wrong, and you don’t know what you are talking about, and that *their* method (which they only have a half-arsed understanding of, from a previous answer) is the best and only way.
Similar situation with many forums, I expect. I get the same on the self-sufficiency forums I hang out on… Do you also get the “I’ve decided I’m going to make my fortune by selling X, and I’m going to sell it to this forum first!” posts? (X is usually something which is already in plentiful supply or a Really Bad Idea). I remember one guy who was obviously mad as a box of frogs, who was convinced that the way to enable agriculture in drought-hit countries was to export our used milk containers there so they could fill them with soil and grow plants in there. Apparently this worked well on his allotment in Burnley, but unless Burnley had been hit with a biblical scale drought whilst we weren’t looking, the rest of the forum were a bit unconvinced that conditions would be the same…
Yep, seen that guy too, or his twin brother.
Topic of the month on one of the forums I frequent is the verbal trashing of pellet smokers with simple manual feed mechanisms, like mine and yours.
A guy posted what he described as an overview of controllers for beginners, saying that anyone buying a grill with a manual controller will be disappointed. I responded that the forum was self-selecting for folk who liked to fiddle, and the vast majority of people with these grills get by with the manual controller very well, because they don’t attempt to cook in the middle of winter, with snow on the ground.
It was only after this had gone back and forth a couple of times, with him still insisting that manual controllers cannot turn out good food, that I realised that he represented a company that had just launched a new fully automated pellet grill onto the market, retailing for $1500. Just the kind of guy you want writing your “guide for beginners”.