![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Good Morning Shitheads. Wakeup.
Complaints / Rant about LJ behavior.
With Pictures!
Lets talk about LJ-etiquette shall we?
First off. I’m not trying to persecute specific people; I’m using picture examples because people (read: the online community) ARE generally stupid. If I was really out to get you, I wouldn’t be so kind as to blur out your usernames and IP addresses. In fact, I would link my readers to your journals myself.
Because you see, the truth is, while you're only annoying me, you're branding yourself as a flaming idiot. I'm not the one who should be embarrassed. Come on children, we all learned in grade school to read the instructions first.
About half of this is geared towards community behavior, but it’s also good for people who don’t play in communities.
Now, on to our tutorial in how not to be a complete LJ idiot.
Lets start with usernames. Your username is meant to reflect you. I have a very big interest in all things mythological and magical, have a fondness for unicorns, and am a female, thus my user name is the feminine form of unicorn in the French language.
So remember, people will take an impression based on your username. If your user name declares you as some sort of troll or someone who hates something specific, do not whine when you are initially treated as such kind of person. YOU INSTIGATED IT.
I’d like to start with my whining about comments, but I’ll go with Community Posts first, as it’ll flow a little better.
Now as a member of several communities, and the moderator for a couple, I see a lot of crap. I don't understand why it happens except sheer stupidity & laziness.
When posting to a community, even a very active one, first make at least a reasonable attempt to make sure what you’re posting about hasn’t already been done. If it's been posted within the last week at least, and you repost the same thing, not only do you annoy everyone who will either ignore you or just point you to the old post, you also make yourself look stupid. To make a "Double Post" to a community within 24 hours of the last is even worse.
Now if you do this truly by an unintentional accident, DO NOT LEAVE IT UP. You're wasting space on everyone's LJs. If you find out your mistake, take it down. Is that so hard?
Also, there's the real Double Post, where you submit two copies of the same post to the community within minutes of each other, so the same post is made twice, back-to-back. Come on people, you make a mistake, fine, but delete it, don't leave it up.
The third big no no in Community Posts is the Worthless and/or Unrelated (read: Spam) Post. Do not post to a community with no reason besides posting something. Let it be you contributing something worthwhile. Be it art, story, GOOD discussion, RELATED announcements, etc, be worth the time it takes to read it or don't post it. And don't ever post anything that has nothing to do with the community, no one there wants to see it.
You want to post something not worth a large group's reading time, post it in your personal LJ (that's what it's for) or post it to a community for whom it is worth the time.
What really irks me, is when one of these Worthless Posts gets massive response. It only ENCOURAGES them. If you say anything, tell them they're off-topic or it shouldn't have been posted, and request they take it down, or just contact the community Moderator. Do not give them the pleasure of a large reaction.
A fourth mistake in communities is the spam-and-lurk.
This means you make usually a worthless post, then declare a lack of intrest in the community and announce you'll be sticking around as a lurker. When you come out again, no one will respect or like you, or anything you have to say. You just killed yourself before you began. If you're going to lurk, lurk, if not, don't. Don't be a troll, even if it's just one time, troll-ish behavior sticks.
Now on to Commenting.
This tends to be one of my biggest pet peeves, and the largest source of idiocy.
One. Do not post a comment completely unrelated to the post without a good reason. Okay? That's simple.
Two. When replying to a post, or replying to comments. There's this really fun trick. Very simple really, even an idiot can catch on. When you reply to a post, this is called a comment in the LJ world. Most LJers have it set up so that anytime someone comments to something they've written, LJ e-mails them so that they know you said something, and they can reply to you. To reply to the main post you click the comment link or the "Post a New Comment" link. When replying to someone's comment, clink the "Reply to This" link. If you don't do that when replying to a comment, the person who you're replying to will never know you said anything, and anyone who sees it has just been told that you cannot comprehend simple instructions. Good for you.
We see our "Double Post"er from earlier has this problem along with not knowing how to delete a post.
Three. Deleting comments. Deleting a post of your own to shut up trolls, to stop an argument, or to correct a mistaken posting, is fine, I leave that to your discretion. However, Comments are another matter entirely. I told you about that entire replys get emailed bit already. This means that even if you delete a comment, they still have a copy of it, and you just made yourself look pretty fishy and/or pitiful by deleting what you said before.
And people will call you on such behavior.
This is especially stupid behavior when you only wanted to add one line. I'd rather see you made 3 comments adding to your original than to see 1 suspicious-looking deleted comment.
Okay now people?
Get brains and move along your merry little way.
With Pictures!
Lets talk about LJ-etiquette shall we?
First off. I’m not trying to persecute specific people; I’m using picture examples because people (read: the online community) ARE generally stupid. If I was really out to get you, I wouldn’t be so kind as to blur out your usernames and IP addresses. In fact, I would link my readers to your journals myself.
Because you see, the truth is, while you're only annoying me, you're branding yourself as a flaming idiot. I'm not the one who should be embarrassed. Come on children, we all learned in grade school to read the instructions first.
About half of this is geared towards community behavior, but it’s also good for people who don’t play in communities.
Now, on to our tutorial in how not to be a complete LJ idiot.
Lets start with usernames. Your username is meant to reflect you. I have a very big interest in all things mythological and magical, have a fondness for unicorns, and am a female, thus my user name is the feminine form of unicorn in the French language.
So remember, people will take an impression based on your username. If your user name declares you as some sort of troll or someone who hates something specific, do not whine when you are initially treated as such kind of person. YOU INSTIGATED IT.
I’d like to start with my whining about comments, but I’ll go with Community Posts first, as it’ll flow a little better.
Now as a member of several communities, and the moderator for a couple, I see a lot of crap. I don't understand why it happens except sheer stupidity & laziness.
When posting to a community, even a very active one, first make at least a reasonable attempt to make sure what you’re posting about hasn’t already been done. If it's been posted within the last week at least, and you repost the same thing, not only do you annoy everyone who will either ignore you or just point you to the old post, you also make yourself look stupid. To make a "Double Post" to a community within 24 hours of the last is even worse.
Now if you do this truly by an unintentional accident, DO NOT LEAVE IT UP. You're wasting space on everyone's LJs. If you find out your mistake, take it down. Is that so hard?
Also, there's the real Double Post, where you submit two copies of the same post to the community within minutes of each other, so the same post is made twice, back-to-back. Come on people, you make a mistake, fine, but delete it, don't leave it up.
The third big no no in Community Posts is the Worthless and/or Unrelated (read: Spam) Post. Do not post to a community with no reason besides posting something. Let it be you contributing something worthwhile. Be it art, story, GOOD discussion, RELATED announcements, etc, be worth the time it takes to read it or don't post it. And don't ever post anything that has nothing to do with the community, no one there wants to see it.
You want to post something not worth a large group's reading time, post it in your personal LJ (that's what it's for) or post it to a community for whom it is worth the time.
What really irks me, is when one of these Worthless Posts gets massive response. It only ENCOURAGES them. If you say anything, tell them they're off-topic or it shouldn't have been posted, and request they take it down, or just contact the community Moderator. Do not give them the pleasure of a large reaction.
A fourth mistake in communities is the spam-and-lurk.
This means you make usually a worthless post, then declare a lack of intrest in the community and announce you'll be sticking around as a lurker. When you come out again, no one will respect or like you, or anything you have to say. You just killed yourself before you began. If you're going to lurk, lurk, if not, don't. Don't be a troll, even if it's just one time, troll-ish behavior sticks.
Now on to Commenting.
This tends to be one of my biggest pet peeves, and the largest source of idiocy.
One. Do not post a comment completely unrelated to the post without a good reason. Okay? That's simple.
Two. When replying to a post, or replying to comments. There's this really fun trick. Very simple really, even an idiot can catch on. When you reply to a post, this is called a comment in the LJ world. Most LJers have it set up so that anytime someone comments to something they've written, LJ e-mails them so that they know you said something, and they can reply to you. To reply to the main post you click the comment link or the "Post a New Comment" link. When replying to someone's comment, clink the "Reply to This" link. If you don't do that when replying to a comment, the person who you're replying to will never know you said anything, and anyone who sees it has just been told that you cannot comprehend simple instructions. Good for you.
We see our "Double Post"er from earlier has this problem along with not knowing how to delete a post.
Three. Deleting comments. Deleting a post of your own to shut up trolls, to stop an argument, or to correct a mistaken posting, is fine, I leave that to your discretion. However, Comments are another matter entirely. I told you about that entire replys get emailed bit already. This means that even if you delete a comment, they still have a copy of it, and you just made yourself look pretty fishy and/or pitiful by deleting what you said before.
And people will call you on such behavior.
This is especially stupid behavior when you only wanted to add one line. I'd rather see you made 3 comments adding to your original than to see 1 suspicious-looking deleted comment.
Okay now people?
Get brains and move along your merry little way.