When you ask a question and only get one reply

You belong here as much as any of us do, firemonkey, IMHO (likewise that other forum that we both frequent.)

Starting a thread which no-one else responds to can happen to any of us; it has certainly happened to me often enough. That's just part of the social dynamics of an internet forum. Unlike in real life, where being ignored often is a form of social rejection, on a forum, it usually just means that no-one felt they had a pertinent or helpful answer.

So, does that mean that your question was "irrelevant"? No, that would be the wrong word to use, IMHO. It is just that the technical minutia of the constantly shifting categorisations of the autism spectrum are, firstly, something that most of us are simply not qualified to speak about, and secondly, only ambiguously and indirectly related to what we do know - the experience of living with particular traits. Even those of us with a formal diagnosis can struggle to see the connection between what the experts write about us in our assessment reports and the day-to-day consequences of being autistic (or whatever other condition we may have been diagnosed with.) We also rarely know what other possible diagnoses the people who diagnosed us may or may not have considered.

If someone describes their experiences and asks us what we think, we can answer by pointing out what similarities we see with our own experiences. But when a question is essentially asking, "what would a trained developmental psychologist think", we're not equipped to answer that because we've only experienced being diagnostic subjects, not being diagnosticians.

Thinking about your threads here and on that other forum, I'm pretty sure that when you ask about and describe your experiences, you do generally get more responses. Not getting lots of answers to questions about the technicalities of diagnostics isn't a reflection of how other members perceive you, it is just a generic limitation of peer-to-peer support networks, and would apply to anybody, regardless of how similar or dissimilar they might be to other members.

You belong here as much as any of us do, firemonkey, IMHO (likewise that other forum that we both frequent.)

Starting a thread which no-one else responds to can happen to any of us; it has certainly happened to me often enough. That's just part of the social dynamics of an internet forum. Unlike in real life, where being ignored often is a form of social rejection, on a forum, it usually just means that no-one felt they had a pertinent or helpful answer.

So, does that mean that your question was "irrelevant"? No, that would be the wrong word to use, IMHO. It is just that the technical minutia of the constantly shifting categorisations of the autism spectrum are, firstly, something that most of us are simply not qualified to speak about, and secondly, only ambiguously and indirectly related to what we do know - the experience of living with particular traits. Even those of us with a formal diagnosis can struggle to see the connection between what the experts write about us in our assessment reports and the day-to-day consequences of being autistic (or whatever other condition we may have been diagnosed with.) We also rarely know what other possible diagnoses the people who diagnosed us may or may not have considered.

If someone describes their experiences and asks us what we think, we can answer by pointing out what similarities we see with our own experiences. But when a question is essentially asking, "what would a trained developmental psychologist think", we're not equipped to answer that because we've only experienced being diagnostic subjects, not being diagnosticians.

Thinking about your threads here and on that other forum, I'm pretty sure that when you ask about and describe your experiences, you do generally get more responses. Not getting lots of answers to questions about the technicalities of diagnostics isn't a reflection of how other members perceive you, it is just a generic limitation of peer-to-peer support networks, and would apply to anybody, regardless of how similar or dissimilar they might be to other members.