Spelling Requirements

Hi All,

I'd like to see a harsher moderation on spelling and grammar for new forum Topics. I understand slip ups but some posts are just ridiculously flawed.
While I've always been semi-nice to people like this, (pointing them to How-to-post links, etcetera) guidelines and rules just don't seem to catch on whatsoever.

I'd like to see moderators post a notice on how to post, close or delete the thread and allow for a proper re-posting of the question. This might be harsh, but it really won't hurt anybody. Actually, I think it might benefit all of us by:

1. Teaching the poster proper posting etiquette;
2. Less aggravation for helpful board-members who tend to post the How-to post links and information over and over again;
3. Give the moderators something to do that's genuinely beneficial to the community;
4. And of course, the Forum's Search Engine only responds to proper grammar not to hwlp meh.

I'm not attempting to start a flame-war (and this is all my very personal opinion) but this is my suggestion for the Dev Shed Forums. Let me know what you think and feel free to remove or close this thread if you find it offensive.

I understand what you mean, but I think it may be a bit hard to implement. For all the descriptive and well written posts we get here, you are always going to get 'hlp me pls' posters and no matter how many General Posting Guidelines posts that moderators and admins create, you are always going to get posts like that, no matter how annoying they are, and believe me, they are !

And, as for "Give the moderators something to do that's genuinely beneficial to the community" - I come here to help posters with their Windows problems etc. (albeit not so much recently), not to help them with their spelling and grammar and if that's not helpful to the community, I don't know what is !

I agree with your second paragraph and I meant no disrespect, trust me.

As for the rest, I am simply suggesting posting a link to the guidelines and closing the topic afterwards. This would simply imply a stronger stance on posting behavior allowed on these Forums.

In my opinion, bad grammar and extensive shorthand writing should be restricted to person-to-person communications, not public Forums which are meant to benefit the online community.

The moderators generally don't need to do much because hai,. i ned hwlp wit c program for calulcator sqar root no kno how to do pls hel[.! is going to get slammed by the community at large almost every time. Sometimes this becomes a flame war, then we'll close it. Some times the OP actually starts writing better.

Other times the posts are simply ignored as "I don't need to bother wasting my time here ..."

It all works.

wait, you mean the other moderators aren't correcting all the typos? :¬)

I correct thread titles if they are have spelling mistakes but the general post is ok. If it's a "i nedz d codez" post I just totally ignore it as most of the other posters do. If a thread has a useless title like "Got a question" or "Need Help" then I'll read the post and make up a more suitable title.

Lately I've started to edit posts to wrap code in code tags as I think it makes the place look a bit more professional. Don't want potential new users coming in from a search engine and finding a 400 line post that is 5 lines explanation and 395 lines of unformatted code.

Generally if someone writes a really badly composed post it won't get a reply which means it won't really affect the search results in a bad way since finding that thread wouldn't provide an answer anyway. If someone was patient enough to reply to the thread with a working solution then chances are that they might of given a similar response to someone else with the same problem. Let's face it, alot of the problems are repititions of older ones from people who haven't experienced them before.

As for teaching them etiquette; well if they keep not getting replies it will either teach them that (a) their posting technique sucks and/or (b) everybody hates them. I've seen a few who just blow a gasket - "this forum sucks, I posted this thread like 5 minutes ago and I've had no replies", that being posted at like 4:30am.

Being a mod is fun but having to correct every typeo would make it very tedious. People generally learn what works to get the answer that they want. Personally I think If they don't learn then great, we just helped in weeding out one more copy n paste junky and potentially saved a job for someone who knows how to do things such as make a decent forum post after doing the appropriate search for previous solutions.

How about setting it so that when a new user joins the forum, they have to take a 20 question multiple choice spelling test before they are allowed to post..

@hiker: I'm all for it just kidding, of course. But it might be a good idea if the welcome email included some links to standard Forum etiquette guidelines.

@Tann: Read my post again, I never said to edit any typos, that would be crazy. Simply reply with a standard: "Read this [link to how to post etc.], try again" and lock the thread. Although a bit more verbose than that.

Someone could just write a "dumbarse to proper fcking english" translator and run the post through that. Hmm, I'm going to try that...

Check this puppy out: StupidFilter