When posting questions, please help other forum members understand what you want. Subject titles like “help”, “loco question”, or “has anyone” are meaningless. Try asking “Help with scenery” - or better - “Help with mountain scenery”. Members with expertise in certain subjects may purposely avoid looking at threads with meaningless titles. If you do not get a reply in five minutes, don’t repost right away!! Repeated posts on the same subject may cause some members (like me for instance) to not even look at a post by certain members! If you want an answer to a problem, title your post clearly and give it a few hours or a day for the answer you need!! My[2c]
A great tip is not to have titles in all Caps…
David B
I wish everyone typed in all caps. My hearing’s not that good.[:D]
Sometimes I wonder if people knows that it means that they are shouting?
Thanks God my hearing is still OK so that I can save my caps for the places where they are needed! [:D]
Magnus
Also taking the time to re-read what is going to be posted for spelling and grammatical errors. Now I know this forum isn’t about spelling and such things, but showing a mastery of the English language above a 1st grade level also aids in being taken seriously.
More to the point is to make your ideas or questions clear, not garbled.
David B
Clearly state your question also… such as using scale and other important details.
I would also like to suggest that either within the topic heading itself or immediately within the first paragraph that the poster somehow or other identify the scale a/o gauge he/she is talking about. I participate in this forum as opposed to some others because its multi-scale facility makes it considerably more intellectual in its scope; I make an automatic presumption, however, that, unless specified otherwise, topics here are referencing HO-Scale, this in view of the recent locking-out of “The ‘N’ Crowd”. Just because it is HO-Scale and I am an N-Scaler doesn’t mean that I lock it out of my mind; I maintain a subscription to Model Railroader and RMC for the same reason. I spent many years in HO-Scale and feel I can still make contributions to questions regarding that scale. (Did you get that riogrande3751?) and I recognize that there are many things which an N-Scaler can learn from HO-Scale and vice versa.
We have all seen questions such as: “Can someone tell me where I can find a (pick a road) Kato SD40-2?” only to have someone ask: “What scale?” Only then do we discover that the poster is refering to N-Scale instead of HO-Scale and vice versa. It can get confusing and will own up that I have gotten confused on occasion.
ATTN: jasperofzeal
Loved your response; I didn’t get a chance to read it until after I had formulated and posted my own.
It reminds me of a skit I saw done by one of those British burlesque comics - his name escapes me at the moment; it is h*** to get old; he was reading a Latin phrase from a prompt card You vecome farted; what he should have been reading was [i]You’ve come far, Ted!" Some time back I got reminded in a reprimand by the moderator that this is a model railroad forum and not an English 101 lecture; I would much rather read a post which has obviously been proof-read than one which has not.
I have to be honest. The whole Caps=shouting thing is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
Loathar, you took the words right out of my mouth. Who elected some of the posters here as guardians anyway. Im not talking about the moderators helpers but the self elected police of the forum.
Rant over.
Dave
Please explain what you mean? I didn’t quite follow you?
Magnus
Are you implying that I’m trying to police the conversations? Better stop using smileys and joking on this forum then.
Magnus
Hi,
Good, I thought so but I just wanted to make it clear considering the post that followed your. I thought it was obvious that I was joking.
Their is a lot of weird rules on the net. Some good, some bad.
Have a nice Easter,
Magnus
How about those whose mother tongue is not English? I try hard but lets face it, English is a foreign language to me.
Jack W.
I know there will be some people whose native tongue is not English. But to be honest, I’ve seen some of those people write in English a whole lot better than some whose native tongue is English. Heck, even I don’t claim to know how to spell or use every word in the language correctly, but I at least try to fix as much as I can so that I don’t come accross as uneducated or careless. If I’m unsure about the spelling of a word, well I just start MS Word, type in the word I’m unsure about, and Word will correct me if I’m wrong about my spelling. If it’s a word that is spelled correctly but used wrong, for example: “The paint is pealing off my model”, instead of; “The paint is peeling off my model”, (the second being the correct statement for paint coming off a model) then Word won’t catch it as a misspelling, so it’s up to me to realize my error. This is where ESL (English as a Second Language) people will have difficulty catching this type of mistake.
As I said before, I know this forum isn’t about spelling and such things, but taking the time to correct a lot of the simple errors in posts can sure make the point come accross more clearly and can get better results.
I agree that the post title should state specifics and rambling confuses people. A few misspells and grammatical errors should be taken with a grain of salt as long as the poster gets his point across.This is a non-formal forum and were just a bunch of trainheads having fun. Many of us slept through journalism class.
I’m a moderator on a couple of computer forums, and we try to get people to post titles that express their problem and describes the message body.
For example, “I need help” as opposed to " I can’t aquire my brand X loco"…specifics are more likely to catch the attention of somewhat more knowledable member, and a faster response.
My .02 from the desert…
ITS PROBABLY BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING!