Unspoken Rules in Forums



Forums are not personal friendly families, despite the idea that may be presented by management.
There are lots of people on forums whose sole purpose is to see how thick skinned or weak skinned other people are by posting insulting comments for no reason at all.

When you join a forum, there are certain unspoken rules that you have to abide by if you want to survive:





1. Never assume that everyone is nice. My personal experience is that about 10% are really not nice.
2. Only choose forums that have an ignore list, so that you can remove the 10% from your purview
3. Be aware that another 10% believe that it is their job to keep everything you post to some unknown standard of exact correctness. For these people, any error you might make is grounds to be corrected, and their expectation is that you want to be corrected, and not that you will take offense.
4. Do not ever share anything personal about yourself, or the 10% will use it to attack you in some way.
5. Do not expect things to be moderated the way you want them moderated. Moderation is a VERY VERY HARD JOB

and is always affected by the politics of the forum, unless the moderator actually owns the forum and pays the bills.

Just make liberal use of the Ignore List.
6. All forums are alike, even if they say they aren't.
If you follow these rules, then you can "make it" on a forum. Otherwise, you will eventually freak out and leave. But if you dofreak out and leave, the 10% will be happy they got you, and the other 90% don't actually give one little whale excrement in the ocean. They'll just calmly
