I understand this perfectly well. But for anyone who’s been on the Internet longer than five minutes, the statement “X has asked me for me online banking login and password,” should immediately set off all kinds of mental warning bells. In the vast majority of cases, this is a phish. It’s been constantly drilled into people for the last fifteen years never to disclose their password for online financial service providers. Not even to the financial service provider themselves. I could go into my spam folder right now and pull up literally hundreds of messages claiming to be from PayPal, banks, credit card providers, and other financial companies requesting my passwords. They are, without exception, fraudsters.
So it turns out there is a tiny minority of legitimate companies out there which are also doing for non-fraudulent purposes. This doesn’t alter the fact that in over 99% of cases, it’s a con. Since the OP didn’t make it clear that he was dealing with these < 1% of cases, why should we have assumed he was? When you hear hoofbeats around these parts, you think horses, not zebras.
GQ ain’t baseball either. You don’t get three whacks at being right.
And even if I were talking about 1% of cases, it’s up to you to get the proper factual information before making a blanket, bombastic, and wrong statement. Two wrong WAGs and then some researching for your third post isn’t how you answer GQs.
This is the SDMB. People post here just to see their trite and ignorant opinions displayed on the internet, not to provide any sort of enlightenment or help of any kind to anyone.
I don’t have a massive problem with this, although it depends on the subject matter. The problem comes when people guess incorrectly, and get mardy when called on it.
Let me get this straight. You went to an online message board asking for free advice from a random assortment of complete strangers. And then you complained about the quality of the answers you got?
True, but sometimes, someone opens a GQ thread and then comes back later to complain, “What, did I stump the SDMB?”, when their thread hasn’t received a response. Sometimes, that’s because no one knows the answer to the question. So which is it? Do the originators of GQ threads only want factual answers and for their threads to be ignored otherwise, or do they want whatever limited information can be provided by the members and risk that some answers are going to be guesses, albeit educated ones?
I don’t know if the general tenor of GQ has changed over the years or it’s just my own waning patience, but I am getting tired of WAGs and joke posts made before an answer is given in good faith.
People often ask questions in GQ not realizing that they’re vague, or don’t make sense, or rest on faulty assumptions. Being the helpful sort of folk we are here, many of us will disambiguate the vagueness or correct what we believe to be the fault in the OP’s assumptions, and then provide the information we thought the OP needed to know. Would you prefer instead that such questions be always taken literally and answered unhelpfully, as a snarky poster did in Comment #13 of the thread on the ICQ number for Firefox?
As no further context or proof was provided, the correct answer to the treis’s question in the first instance was “You are being phished. Get help.” A good analogy would be if someone had posted in GQ saying that he had just bought the Brooklyn Bridge and asking if he could then set up a toll booth. Given the enormous unlikelihood of the premise upon which the question rests, the correct response is, “No you didn’t buy the Brooklyn Bridge. You got scammed by a con artist.” If the OP were then to post “No, really! I bought it from the New York City Department of Transportation,” the correct response is still, “No you didn’t. The con artist is merely pretending to be from the DOT.” It’s just barely conceivable that the government of New York City really did decide to privatize the bridge and that the OP did indeed purchase the title, but it’s so far out of the realm of probability that one can’t be faulted for failing to consider it.
You could have made your question a bit clearer. You knew what you were talking about, but your two-line OP was sufficiently vague as to be misinterpreted as the plaintive wail of someone being scammed.
The difference being that I wasn’t operating under false assumptions or asking a nonsensical question. The problem is that you didn’t know what I was talking about. The people that did know what I was talking about knew exactly what my question was asking.
If you asked if I was getting fished, fine, whatever. But you didn’t. You made a definitive statement that I was. Twice. And both times were incorrect.