[nmjohn]

This highlights one of the fundamental flaws of text-based communication.

In text-based communication, deciding what is important is 100% on the reader - and while to you someone may be responding to irrelevant parts of your questions - to them, it is what they found interesting and thus important.

In face to face communication, the onus of importance is far more shifted to the speaker, because based on tone and facial expression - combined with societal norms - the listener has a much easier time seeing what you find important and a much harder time being able to only latch on to the irrelevant tidbits.

> where I put big disclaimers in my questions to steer users away from those useless (to me) responses.

I have found myself doing a very similar thing - essentially trying to convey the information that gets lost of text to insure the reader can understand what I want to convey is important.