Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / JavaScript / March 2006

kArTiK said:

This isn't chat.  It's a real grown-up newgroup.

If I didn't have a bit of free time on my hands, I, like
many others, wouldn't even bother to read past the first
line of your message.

You're asking for people to volunteer to help you.
Your request should be very polite, very clear, and very
easy to read.

Two things, now that you ask:
- You didn't quote a part of the message you respond to. Tradition is,
for a good good technical reason, to quote enough of the message
you reply to, for creating a context that makes your message
understandable on its own.
See also
<URL:http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/>

That's bad for a different reason. I'm not very familiar with
"chat lingo" in my own language, and I'm surely not familiar
with English language chat lingo. There is *no* good reason
for using it in newsgroups to begin with. It's not a realtime
forum where speed of reply matters and the input device is a
full keyboard, not a cell phone number pad (those are the
two valid reasons I have found for overusing abbreviation).

All it does is to save the writer time at the expense of the
readers. Since there is only one writer and thousands of readers,
that's a very bad tradeof. Readers are known to think: "If
he can't spend the time to write this up properly, why should
I spend the time reading and replying to it" (after all, it
can't be that important then :).

Nothing wrong with it. It rarely works, though. People read
the group, and write their answers, when they have time to
do so.

Which is good.

Now a request from me: Please capitalize, punctuate and skip the chat
lingo. Then if I don't understand what you say, I won't have to guess
between it being the content and the form.

I have long forgotten what the original message said. All I remember
is that I didn't really understand it when I read it. Had it been written
in passable English, I might have asked for clarification. Due to the
chat lingo, I had no idea whether the problem understanding it was due
to the content or the form. So I just skipped it, not caring to spend
time on something the author didn't spend time on himself.

Consider this a helpfull instruction on how to better get answers
to your questions - it works wonders for people's inclination to
spend time answering :)
/L