Announcement Forum Tips & Best Practices

[SHaines]

Forum Tips & Best Practices​

Online forums are a great place for people to meet up and share thoughts on things they love. Forums have been around quite a while, but it can be very helpful to learn a few important things that can substantially improve your experience here.

Steps you can take to keep the forums running smoothly:

• If you see any posts by bots, spammers, or any posts that violate our forums rules, click the Report link beneath the post to notify a Moderator of an issue.
• Keep criticism constructive! If you disagree with an opinion, explain why, but never attack the person.
• Use formatting to improve the quality of your post. See below for a great, quick guide on how to format using BBCode.
• If creating a new post, create a post title that is short, but accurate. If more detail is needed you have the thread's body to provide more details. Here are a good and bad example of post titles:
  • Good - Does a hotter CPU imply more power usage?
    • A very good subject line includes enough specific details that people opening the thread know what to expect
  • Bad - I NEED HELP!
    • Vague thread titles provide no helpful insight into what readers will find when diving into the thread and make it difficult to find helpful info at a glance
• Check the date of the last post in a thread before replying. If the most recent post is more than 3 months old, create a new thread on the same topic. You can link to the previous thread as reference, but we want to avoid “necro” posts that attempt to resuscitate old threads.

Behaviors to avoid in the forums:

• Don’t post in ALL CAPS or use excessive punctuation.
• If you have a lot of info to share, be sure to break your posts up into different paragraphs using the Enter key. It is very difficult to comfortably read a lot of info when it’s displayed as a wall of text without breaks.
• Use long quotes when responding to messages. Only quote as much of the original post as necessary.
• Don't bump posts, claim "First!" or give single-word replies. Clear and correct answers will encourage more people to stop by and engage with our community.
• Hijacking a topic. Keep to the original subject matter so the entire community can be confident that the posts they read will have info relevant to their questions. This also makes conversations easier to find when others come looking for similar answers.
• Spam or encourage spam. Commercial spam is handled with a zero tolerance policy. No posting links to any commercial service or product if you are personally affiliated.
• Be rude or impolite. Behind each user is a real person. Personal attacks or insults are not allowed.

Style Guide​

• If you’d like to create a forum signature banner, the dimensions for those are 400x75 pixels, and only one is allowed to be displayed.
• If your signature contains links, please ensure they adhere to our commercial spam policy.
• If attempting to upload images to the forum, please keep them under 800 pixels in width. If your images are uploaded to a third party site, such as Imgur, large images will be automatically scaled down to fit properly.
• Our forums allow users to type directly in BBCode, if they wish, but you can also use the quick tooltips menu to format on the fly. Simply click the gear icon to swap between automated formatting or manual coding. When BBCode is disabled, you'll use icons to format text, as you would in any word processing software.

Please keep in mind that forum accounts are non-transferable.

Many of these guidelines are common sense, and serve to keep the forums useful, safe and secure for everyone. We thank you for your cooperation and support in this, and if you have any questions, suggestions or feedback regarding the Rules of Conduct, please ping a Moderator or Community Manager.

Welcome to the community!