> another problem you have, is you take everything literally,
> and as if it was to be aplied to you.

I was under the impression that you attempted to present a real-life analogy to illustrate the situation we have right here. If you didn't, it's been a misunderstanding from my side and I'm sorry for that.

> It was an example

But obviously one that is not sufficiently fitting the situation here ;-)

> I'm not telling you what to do.

I didn't understand it that way either, but I (mis-)thought that you were attempting at giving me hints at how to resolve this (non-)issue by telling me about how you treat your workmate so that she doesn't feel offended.

> If you don't want to avoid it, you are free of course, but you should not say
> you don't know the reason why people insult you.

I'm afraid that your example didn't give me any idea as for the reason for people insulting me, as the only ideas I took from it don't sufficiently fit this situation, as you've made clear now.

> It was not meant to be aplied out of the box.

Thanks for clarification.

> I'm just telling you what I see, from an neutral point of view.
> You can take my advises, or not... just that.

I know that. And I'm only replying to that from my own point of view, to explain how I see it.

> The fact you don't think something is offensive, doesn't mean it isn't
> (at least for everyone). [...] almost everything can be perceived as bad
> in a forum, at least in my experience.

So I conclude the best measure to never offend anybody would be to never ever write in a forum, right? ;-) I think I'll prefer to go with the old saying: I'll only do unto others as I would have others do unto me. (And that includes replying to questions with mere links, I'm afraid.) I really don't see any other sensible expedient to get out of that dilemma.

> The oposite to RTFM, would be answering with an explanation.

You're right, a link is not really the opposite. But still, it's very far from "RTFM".

> You could even say something like "This happens because
> blabla [brief explanation]. You can read more in this thread".

More often than not this would equal me adopting this explanation when in fact it's not my intention to do so. Thus, I'd have to write something like "XYZ claimed that this would happen because blabla [brief explanation]". But that's exactly what the questioner realizes as soon as he clicks my link anyway. So I don't see the difference except that it would be less economical and more work for me to repeat what others already said before, which I'm not eager to do, really. That's the technical advantage of the WWW to be able to instantly refer to things that have been said before without actually having to repeat them over and over again.