Just written a general guide to forums, opinions?
 

Morning all!

I've just written a very general guide to be used as guidelines on a couple of forums. Though i'd come here and subject it to your scrutiny.

http://www.sworm.plus.com/avi/forumhelp.htm

There's a couple of typos and spelling mistakes there, which will be ironed out before i properly finish it. After ideas for content more than anything else.

Ideally needs to stay as general as possible. It's to be used on a mountain bike forum, a PC forum and a gaming forum....

Cheers!

You forgot what I think is the most important rule: Lurk for a while. I have seen it many times where someone reads a few posts, thinks they understand the forum and then posts and gets shot down in flames.

Good article.

Well in many cases STFW is the wrong answer - we want to keep people here, so it'd be STFF (Search The Fine Forums) ;)

Nicely done. Keep up the excellent work.

All Roads Lead To Rome
 

STFW works quite well. Normally searches on a Linux related problem or issue will return multiple hits from this forum anyway. And XavierP is right, I should be lurking more.

Nicely done. Some *small* misspellings/grammatical errors, but much better reading than the norm. I have to admit that I love the "Posting And You" flash video. You might consider linking to it. Also, if this guide is intended for forum newbies, you might want to consider a brief explanation of just what "bumping" and "post padding" are.

Another good piece of advice is that if a thread helped you solve your problem, post that. Its a way of thanking the forum members for helping you as well as stopping (or at least slowing) unnecessary posts to a thread that has lost its purpose.

Oooh, positive feedback! always good! Cheers! Going through spellchecking/grammarchecking now.

I'll put a link to the posting and you flash video in there somewhere, too.

EDIT: Changes made, new version uploaded.