Forum Etiquette

Here you will find a list of things you can do to give respect and get respect. While most of the things listed here are not required, doing them will likely make you be seen as an experienced user. Please also note that some user-created forums allow some of this.

Kindness

Always be nice. This is one of the most important etiquette rules that should be followed everywhere.

As an example, if someone calculated the expression wrong, do not say: “Gosh, you’re terrible at math. You don’t know 1+1 is, you fool.” Instead, say something along the lines of: “It looks like you calculated wrong. Try doing it again. :)"

Posting

Postfarming

“Postfarming” is when a user posts excessively to raise their post count. While some user-created forums allow this, specifically in spam threads or threads made for the purpose of getting a lot of posts in them, outside of those spaces and in all non-user-created forums, this could lead to a warning, or in some instances, a possible ban.

Double, triple, quadruple, etc. posting is often viewed as post farming or spam.

Spam

Spamming is essentially the same as post-farming. However, spam may be just in one post, not all in separate posts.

An example of spam is off-topic or useless posts such as “ghfghhfgfl!”

Snipping

Let’s say you have quoted a post and that post is really long but you only wanted to quote a small portion of it.

Instead of leaving it as is, you can snip it.

Snipping is where you remove the non-applicable text, leaving only the text you want to reply to.

For example, if a user posted: “My mother makes the best pasta in the country. I live in France. Did you know people in France can eat Italian food? Crazy, right?” If you wanted to reply “I live in France, too,” you could shorten the quote to “I live in France.”

Commands

Contrary to what many users seem to believe, posting commands in a thread does nothing.

/req lock doesn’t lock the thread.

/lock doesn’t lock the thread either.

/report doesn’t report the thread.

/bump technically does bump the topic, but posting the command is unnecessary when you can add to the conversation.

New Threads

When posting a new thread, use the search engine to make sure a thread on the same topic doesn’t already exist.

Make sure you are posting it in the correct forum.