h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have to say that a very important bit of Netiquette on h2g2 or other online forums is correct spelling and grammer. Often times I'm chatting in online forums like h2g2, and find messages like:

"dood check this webpage i found yestrday its so coo lol lol cya"

Certainly I don't expect perfect diction for something as informal as an online forum, but some people seem to believe that it's proper to throw away all punctuation, capitalization, spelling and grammer when writing a post. Ignoring the rules of english like this just makes the post confusing and unreadable. Just because all those acronyms and jumbled words make sense to you, don't expect them to be understood clearly by other readers. It's dreadfully hard to unscramble posts without periods or capitalization.

These posts are bad Netiquette because they add "noise" to the community.

By the way, these sorts of messages are rare on h2g2. It's mostly *other* web sites.

JyZude,
ranting again.

In certain circles online, it is perfectly acceptable to discard some elements of grammar. However, people take it beyond the limit. When engaged in real-time chat, for instance, it helps to cheat so you can communicate faster. So if you ran across me in such a media, you would see my capitalization disappear, and I wouldn't punctuate the ends of my posts unless they were questions. I'd use contractions more frequently, and I'd resort to colloquialisms like "kinda" or "gotta."

H2G2 is NOT a real-time media, and so people should stick to good grammar. When you don't use proper grammar, it changes the way the post "sounds" in your head. And yes, it becomes "noise." Here's one example of bad behavior I've seen here and elsewhere:

When you don't
bother to complete
a line but overuse the
enter key and don't
punctuate either

There is no reason at all for this behavior. When I see this on IRC, I am annoyed, and I use my /ignore command to block that noise. When I come across it on H2G2, I just don't read the post, but skip right past it. It's too difficult to read to even bother with.

I agree - correct punctuation is the key.

Naturally, some people aren't educated enough to use appropriate spelling or grammar (or can't for other reasons), but all the same they should certainly not resort to too many abbreviations.

Some such things are common though, and I feel they should be acceptable. Things like 'LOL', 'ROFL', 'BBL' and such, as long as they're used when necessary.