So far, it’s more fun to post with the main name, but at times I have things to say I know YOU personally don’t approve of, such as my antipathy for more etiquette rules. So I use another name.
If you didn’t try to suppress those ideas, I’d have no need for another name.
“YOU” meaning Unc, of course.
Naw, that’s all right, Rhummy. It it wasn’t this thread today, it’d be another tomorrow.
Anyway, to address your issue, in theory I’m not against a rule asking people to lay off posting spelling corrections. Lemme point the rest of the staff to this thread (they may or may not see it) and we can see what they think. Okay?
I think making it an official board rule would be overkill. I’m sure the mods don’t want the hassle of trying to police it.
Well damnit, that’s what they are paid for…oh, wait…
Right, official written in stone rule isn’t good, just a strong suggestion that it isn’t necessary. Lord knows the mods don’t need more work.
I’m with Rhum Runner - it’s just plain annoying. I don’t need to see posts like
“The, not teh. :smack:”
ever again. But OTOH they only annoy me for about 1.5 seconds as I skip over them.
I think the number of such posts is negligible. Certainly compared to the amount of bandwidth and moderator time taken up by Mysticetes/Waxon/You rang?/etc coming over here to jerk off in public.
Reminder that if you make a typo that really bugs the hell out of you, an email to a mod or admin will usually get it fixed.
I think that a rule is by no means the way to go – an “encouragement” like the one about using one’s .sig only once per thread (which I presume would have a built-in exception for where one’s .sig furnishes an important comment on the remarks of an immediately previous poster, made reference to in the text of one’s post) would be quite adequate.
“Teh graphic artists…” is clearly a typo for “the…” not a reference to artists who specialize in calligraphic Cyrillic T’s. I have no idea how many times I’ve typed something like “…the clear meaning fo this passage in Matthew…” over in Great Debates, and I assumed that most people would see that as a typo for “of” and not an attempt to use Urban Black Dialect “fo’” (for) in an inappropriate context.
On the other hand, a post saying,
[quote]
When I said
what I actually meant was
is a definite aid to clarity – though the Mods. are usually quick to assist if asked courteously to make such a change. IMHO, it depends on time and circumstance; if Great Debates is busy at 12:00 Friday night, making the immediate correction post rather than bugging a Mod. who may be offline for some hours is the right way to go; making the same typo at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, I’d e-mail the Mods. instead.
But probably the key point for me is not to repost to correct a typo in coding a link; people can figure out what the URL is (it’s right there, just in the middle of coding gibberish), and a Mod. will fix that on request. I’m talking about stuff like{url=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=173289”]this thread in place of this thread. (Mods., please don’t fix that link – and everyone else, it just links back to the thread this is posted in, as an example.) It should be obvious to anyone what the URL to save out of that if you want to look up my link is supposed to be; a second post to correct it is totally unnecessary. IMHO, all one needs to do is just report the booboo, and trust in the good graces of the Mods.
Which brings me to another bright idea…
Would the Administration give consideration to a real “Junior Mod. Squad” of 20 or 30 reliable posters that might be given editing rights, with the idea of correcting obvious typoes and coding problems as they run across them? I can think of a large number of people who read much of the board on a regular basis, based on their posts, who may not have wanted to volunteer for Mod. status and/or commit the time to reading every new post in a forum, but who could be trusted to properly use and not abuse that editing privilege to make the regular Mods. work a bit easier – Duck Duck Goose, Ask Nott, Xenophon, Zette, Biggirl, and Diane come quickly to mind as people I’d trust to have editing privileges over my posts, and that’s merely a selection from as fast as I could type this paragraph.
Poly, I’d prefer to not give anyone editing rights over anything I write because quite frankly it’s not their damn problem if I have a glaring typo or not in my post. And honestly, one of the posters you listed above I wouldn’t want within twenty feet of changing the content in one of my posts, no matter how badly I had mangled a word or sentence.
Furthermore giving a group of posters the ability to edit posts, even if it’s only for typos, opens up the possibility for this power to be abused, either by the person correcting the typos, or by the person whose post has been edited. If you give a group of posters carte blanche to go into other people’s posts to correct typos there is the possibility that one of them might be having a bad day and horribly change the content of a post out of spite. Although I doubt anyone you mentioned above would do such a thing ultimately we are all human and we have all succumbed to temptation at one point or another so I don’t think this is completely unreasonable.
Conversely, if someone’s post is edited for spelling and they wind up losing an argument further on in a thread they could claim that it was because one of the “junior mods” changed the meaning of their earlier post, and then there’ll be a ruckus over whether or not that actually happened, is the poster lying, is the mini-mod lying, etc.
Also, although everyone (well most) you listed above seems reasonable and levelheaded there is the possibility, however small, that they could completely throw a post out of whack and change its meaning by correcting a typo that didn’t need to be corrected and may have been intentionally put in.
I’m not a mod, and this is up to them, but sorry Poly, that just sounds like a bad idea to me and I recommend against the mods instituting it.
Poly, I must agree with Asylum on this one. Either I correct my typing, or no one does, outside of the occasional, and helpful, coding fixes from the mods.
If I produce a typo that makes a sentence unintelligible, how would a “junior mod” know what I’d meant to say?
And, as pointed out above, I doubt we’d easily reach any consensus about who the “relable” posters are.
Additionally, I’d imagine drawing duty as a typo ranger would quickly make the SDMB experience somewhat of a virtual hell for a “junior mod.”
I really appreciate it when people DON’T apologize for double posts. Most people know that either the board has hiccuped or the poster hit the submit button more than once. I know that it’s very natural to want to explain or apologize, but it’s really not necessary.
However, I don’t plan on making this a rule any time soon.
Polycarp: I thought about suggesting a Junior Mod-type thing for deleting double posts and fixing coding, but I considered it for a couple of weeks, and I really don’t think it’s worth it.
Junior Mods - yet another reason for “people” to complain about the SDMB clique. Don’t do it.
… they’d be confused with “Junior Mints” and be eaten alive.
Those can be very refreshing.
I don’t think little grammar errors are major sins.
We’re all just a keystroke from disaster anyway.
If the error changes meaning, well, let us know and we’ll correct it. That’s a horse of a different color.
Otherwise, try to overlook the follies of others and let this go by, okay?
We have enough amateur Junior Mods without creating the job title, really.
your humble TubaDiva
Adminstrator
I wouldn’t touch that Spelling Geek job with a ten-foot pole. Or poll, or Pole, depending on how you spell it. Either way, I can think of easier ways to get myself pitted, but not faster ones.
Quoth Polycarp:
On this point, I would disagree. It’s not much extra burden for you or I, true. But there are varying degrees of computer literacy on the board, and some folks might really not know what to do with a URL that isn’t a link. Certainly, whenever someone has a link with a period accidentally added to the end, there are usually two or three posts saying the link doesn’t work, before someone posts a fixed version. And that’s not much more difficult to fix than a broken-code link.