A Rant of Message Board Etiquette
Posted: 2004-02-13 01:33pm
OK, guys, let me get something off my chest. This is something that has been bothering me for a bit, in fact, every since I started posting on message boards. Some people respond to others peoples posts in damn annoying ways; ways that could be fixed by applying basic English Comp 101 stuff to everyday typing. People who do some of these things should swing from the net gallows.
For one thing, and this isn't that much of a problem here, but it has been at some message boards I've typed on in the past, is that so using short cuts in typing and refusal to use any punctionation at all. This comes under the form of stuff like haxor, where writers bizarrely abbreviate and place characters with characters that sort of look like them, et cetera. u no \/\/0t i meen???// Worse, they do this on purpose. Why, why, WHY would anyone do this? It's not like it's any quicker to type and only makes it much harder to read. While I'm sure that's part of the goal, then they don't understand why everyone thinks they are fucking morons. Another form of this -- and they often go hand in hand -- are the people who have no idea how to use punctuation or capitialization. How much effort does it take to stretch your pinky over to the shift key in order to make your message so much easier to read by other people? What these people don't seem to understand is that such things exist for a reason. Punctuation and capitalization are notes and guides sprinkled in words to help break paragraphs and sentences up into meaningful bits of information, making the sentence immediately more readable. It's a proven fact that leaving out such things slows reading rates down like molasses because the person has to read and re-read a statement to mentally insert those guide posts and breaks in order to make sense of the post. Such people should be tarred and feathered in an ideal world, but at the very least they can treated without any seriousness.
Another thing that really bugs me, like a hunk of steak caught between the teeth, are people who who type something incredibly snide, or rude, or bitchy, then sprinkle on some smileys like it makes what they said any less snide/rude/bitchy. This has some serious offenders that I've noticed, who use emoticons like shields, that when every they get called on their sniping, they go "Hey man, I stuck a
in there, so you can't take it seriously!" Moron. There is a difference between ribbing/joking with someone and sniping at them with a smiley. It's called context and if you are being snide, then putting fifty smileys in there won't change that. So if you are actually intending on ribbing someone or joking with them, try wording your message in a way that clears your intention. This is a mistake that lots of people, including myself in particular, have made before, because on a message board, people can't see a shiteating grin or hear the jovial inflection in your voice. Smileys can be useful there, but people who think that they are a carte blanc to be an ass should face a net firing squad.
Then there are spelling/grammar nitpick nazis. I'm sure you people know them. They are people if they see a single transposed pair of letters, or a misspelled word, or a grammatical error, they respond to your post with the intent of nitpicking it with messages like "I think you meant to say 'off' there instead of 'of'". All this does is take up real estate and it adds nothing to the thread. So here's the thought, unless their typo dramatically effects the content of their post, how about you keep your trap shut and not waste anyones times nitpicking someone saying "there" instead of "their" accidently. While it's important that people use decent grammar, as long as the message is on the whole completely understand able, there shouldn't be a problem. Thus nitpick nazis should be thrown in a cage with an amorous bull rhino.
Finally (since I only have a limited time to wrap this up), are the over-quoters. These are people who respond to a two paragraph post by quoting each and every individual sentence, and responding to them seperately. This is a grievous sin in my eyes for several reasons.
For one thing, they might have paid more attention in English Comp 101, but a paragraph ideally is a packet of information that contains no more or less than one complete thought. When you break it up like that, or take one sentence out of the paragraph and discard the rest, you are taking a piece of a thought out of it's context and responding only it it. This is a bad thing, because it misrepresents what the person is talking about and even can make it look like the person is talking about something else entirely (a standard creationist trick, I might add). You might say "Well, what if there is only one bit of information in the paragraph that you want to specifically point out and respond to. Well, we've got alot of options on a message board which emphasizes text, like italicizing it or bolding it. Thus you can do this:
Also, quoting every last sentence individually greatly increase the size of the posts and the time it takes to respond. When you quote a paragraph and respond with a paragraph, a person can respond in kind with their own paragraphes. These might get bigger as more information and more thoughts are being thrown around, but the rate of growth is pretty slow overall. Now if a poster took a four paragraph post and broke it down into 20 something individual quotes, then a person responding to it now doesn't have four things to respond to, but 20, even though there was no increase in content! This is time consuming and often times people have to give up and not respond to things, in effect, conceding the point, even though they could have easily handled it if the one person had responded in terms of paragraphs than individual sentences. It also makes post lengths grow a geometric length. A person wanting to make sure everthing is addressed might respond to everything, and could easily respond to a one liner blurb with a several sentence response, then the over-quoter will break up those responses into minute fractions and one-line blurb them! Note to mention that the quote function takes up alot of space, leaving large areas of white space breaking up a post and making it extremely long. This makes posts huge and completely exhausting to respond to, at which point, people give up because it's not worth the effort. Because of this over-quoters need to be bisected and feed to Marina's flying monkeys.
Anything anyone wants to add to this spiel?
For one thing, and this isn't that much of a problem here, but it has been at some message boards I've typed on in the past, is that so using short cuts in typing and refusal to use any punctionation at all. This comes under the form of stuff like haxor, where writers bizarrely abbreviate and place characters with characters that sort of look like them, et cetera. u no \/\/0t i meen???// Worse, they do this on purpose. Why, why, WHY would anyone do this? It's not like it's any quicker to type and only makes it much harder to read. While I'm sure that's part of the goal, then they don't understand why everyone thinks they are fucking morons. Another form of this -- and they often go hand in hand -- are the people who have no idea how to use punctuation or capitialization. How much effort does it take to stretch your pinky over to the shift key in order to make your message so much easier to read by other people? What these people don't seem to understand is that such things exist for a reason. Punctuation and capitalization are notes and guides sprinkled in words to help break paragraphs and sentences up into meaningful bits of information, making the sentence immediately more readable. It's a proven fact that leaving out such things slows reading rates down like molasses because the person has to read and re-read a statement to mentally insert those guide posts and breaks in order to make sense of the post. Such people should be tarred and feathered in an ideal world, but at the very least they can treated without any seriousness.
Another thing that really bugs me, like a hunk of steak caught between the teeth, are people who who type something incredibly snide, or rude, or bitchy, then sprinkle on some smileys like it makes what they said any less snide/rude/bitchy. This has some serious offenders that I've noticed, who use emoticons like shields, that when every they get called on their sniping, they go "Hey man, I stuck a
in there, so you can't take it seriously!" Moron. There is a difference between ribbing/joking with someone and sniping at them with a smiley. It's called context and if you are being snide, then putting fifty smileys in there won't change that. So if you are actually intending on ribbing someone or joking with them, try wording your message in a way that clears your intention. This is a mistake that lots of people, including myself in particular, have made before, because on a message board, people can't see a shiteating grin or hear the jovial inflection in your voice. Smileys can be useful there, but people who think that they are a carte blanc to be an ass should face a net firing squad.Then there are spelling/grammar nitpick nazis. I'm sure you people know them. They are people if they see a single transposed pair of letters, or a misspelled word, or a grammatical error, they respond to your post with the intent of nitpicking it with messages like "I think you meant to say 'off' there instead of 'of'". All this does is take up real estate and it adds nothing to the thread. So here's the thought, unless their typo dramatically effects the content of their post, how about you keep your trap shut and not waste anyones times nitpicking someone saying "there" instead of "their" accidently. While it's important that people use decent grammar, as long as the message is on the whole completely understand able, there shouldn't be a problem. Thus nitpick nazis should be thrown in a cage with an amorous bull rhino.
Finally (since I only have a limited time to wrap this up), are the over-quoters. These are people who respond to a two paragraph post by quoting each and every individual sentence, and responding to them seperately. This is a grievous sin in my eyes for several reasons.
For one thing, they might have paid more attention in English Comp 101, but a paragraph ideally is a packet of information that contains no more or less than one complete thought. When you break it up like that, or take one sentence out of the paragraph and discard the rest, you are taking a piece of a thought out of it's context and responding only it it. This is a bad thing, because it misrepresents what the person is talking about and even can make it look like the person is talking about something else entirely (a standard creationist trick, I might add). You might say "Well, what if there is only one bit of information in the paragraph that you want to specifically point out and respond to. Well, we've got alot of options on a message board which emphasizes text, like italicizing it or bolding it. Thus you can do this:
See what I did there? The massage is still in context, but it's been emphasized so everyone can see what you are responding to. Hurray!Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Part that you wish to respond to. Blah blah blah blah blah.
Also, quoting every last sentence individually greatly increase the size of the posts and the time it takes to respond. When you quote a paragraph and respond with a paragraph, a person can respond in kind with their own paragraphes. These might get bigger as more information and more thoughts are being thrown around, but the rate of growth is pretty slow overall. Now if a poster took a four paragraph post and broke it down into 20 something individual quotes, then a person responding to it now doesn't have four things to respond to, but 20, even though there was no increase in content! This is time consuming and often times people have to give up and not respond to things, in effect, conceding the point, even though they could have easily handled it if the one person had responded in terms of paragraphs than individual sentences. It also makes post lengths grow a geometric length. A person wanting to make sure everthing is addressed might respond to everything, and could easily respond to a one liner blurb with a several sentence response, then the over-quoter will break up those responses into minute fractions and one-line blurb them! Note to mention that the quote function takes up alot of space, leaving large areas of white space breaking up a post and making it extremely long. This makes posts huge and completely exhausting to respond to, at which point, people give up because it's not worth the effort. Because of this over-quoters need to be bisected and feed to Marina's flying monkeys.
Anything anyone wants to add to this spiel?
