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Old 22nd July 2008
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USofA
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Being one of the few people who frequent this forum without a BSDForums history behind them, I know what I expect of 'seasoned members' is little more then I do of suhc people in any other technical-oriented group.



0/ Be knowledgeable of the domain in question.

---> knowledge doesn't buy wisdom but there are plenty of wise enough people here. I often have much more respect for people who show that they are competent in an area then for those who are merely being verbose about it.


1/ Be reasonably polite to and respectful of other forum visitors (regular, noob, or pest).

---> In one circle in which I am involved in: you behave as such or you will likely get your account moved to /dev/banned.


2/ Be active within the community and help keep the forum alive and vibrant.

--> Example: taking six weeks to get a reply from someone, if _at all_ would suck. I've seen this happen to people numerous times outside these walls. Well, you know what I mean by walls :-P. Forums that become stagnated are also of no help to anyone, beyond picking its remains for useful information.


3/ Understand enough of the English language to be able to communicate effectively.


---> IMHO in terms of languages: it's more or less the lowest common detonator on the internet.


4/ Be patient with people -- not everyone is like you.


Quote:
Originally Posted by ai-danno View Post
imagine how hard it is for them to decode grammaticly incorrect, nonsensical shorthand chickenscratch. Was that overly done?
You have just described the quality of my handwriting :-)


My English skills are not the best by any bodies regards, let along my own! The only time I do actually care, is typically when writing e-mail, comments in code, or in more 'sensitive' topics -- in which I try to be carefully composed.


When it comes to reading others words, I don't really care if they wrote it well or not, as long as I can understand it.



Two reasons for my language skills [or lack there of]. I don't give a flying flub about the 'laws of the English language' as strongly as my teachers and as a number of friends have exclaimed:

"I could swear you've never heard of semi-colons."


But most importantly life here requires that I type fast, about as fast as I can think or faster! If a post takes more then ~5minutes, I will likely end up AFK, courtesy of my FH's. Which means speed is of infinitely more important then obeying the laws of American or British English.

----


I think ai-danno has good points, especially when it comes to posts that are not contributing any value to the discussion or the OPs issues.


It's certainly one that I struggle with at times.... Sometimes I will start posting a reply out of instinctive interest in some matter.


Then stop and think, does this actually help anyone reading this thread?


And decide whether to ^W my way to another topic, recompose it appropriately, or post it as is. This is one of the reasons I like the quick-reply feature -- more time to think before ye'post.

A great man once said:

"Tis’ better to be quiet and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt"




Tis' also better to keep thine reply to thyself, then be found a jerk.



(Disclaimer: I have no ability with archaic language.)
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Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.

Last edited by TerryP; 22nd July 2008 at 01:04 AM.
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