If you want me to ignore your posts, but lack the arrogance, persistence, and stupidity necessary to get on my Ignore List, type them without capitals.
A friend of mine is quite intelligent- she’s written books, and at least one of her short stories has won some sort of science fiction award. In her private communications, she never uses capital letters.
It bugs the crap out of me. It just looks like an affectation, nothing more.
They are generally a minor annoyance, unless accompanied by other irregularities, like poor spelling or grammar.
Ditto to that. If you can’t be bothered to write your posts beyond what’s found on Youtube, I’m not going to bothered to read them.
I loathe e e more than even the “shift key what’s a shift key” crowd. At least they don’t write down their experiments in English for posterity.
Even with spelling and punctuation being correct, I still ignore posts in all lower case. They’re not impossible to read, but compared with the freeway-like smoothness of a properly capitalized post, an uncapitalized post is comprehensively analagous to riding down an ungroomed dirt road, and I have more important things to attend to in life.
I stopped posting, and even reading, a forum where they didn’t take the time to punctuate or spell check. It’s a shame.
With over 100 respondents, we now have a clear position: 86% of posters here do not like uncapitalized posts. Nearly half of dopers (who responded to this poll) hate it to the extent it affects whether they read the post or not. I wonder if any of the relatively few non-capitalizers here have been following this poll and will comment on whether it will affect their posting style. After all, presumably people post in order to communicate, and if nearly half your audience doesn’t bother reading your post, your effectiveness is diminished significantly.
It’s been years since I read it, but if I recall correctly, a character in the novel Airport (the one the disaster movies descended from) had a thing about capitals, and had an airline mechanic grind the cap letters from the typebars on her typewriter. (Her what? Get away from me kid, you bother me!) Supposedly an endearing quirk, but I found it annoying as all hell.
It doesn’t bother me at all. It baffles me that it would bother other people so much.
I understand disliking posts with really bad spelling or run-ons with no punctuation, but it’s not that hard to read a post written in all lower-case like it is with all upper-case. I don’t get what the big deal is. This is the only board I’ve posted on where people have this problem, or at least discuss it.
It only bothers me very slightly when the poster is otherwise apparently literate. It’s just that, as a rule, a post with no caps also contains little in the way of spell-check, punctuation, grammar, etc.
As an example of what I was talking about in my first sentence, I have an older sister who sometimes emails me and never uses caps. But her emails are clearly worded, contain fairly proper punctuation, etc.
In return, I just rib her about it. The first year I got an email like that from her, inquiring whether I’d be at her house for Christmas dinner, I said I would, and I was bringing her a ‘special gift’. Her special gift was an entire page of printed out random capital letters “to use as you see necessary, since you don’t seem to have any of your own”.
I know my sister well enough to know she’d think that was funny. If I’d had any question that she’d be offended, I wouldn’t have done it.
Well how else am I supposed to judge you when I can’t see your shoes? :dubious:
As I mentioned in the last thread, style is content. It conveys information. Unless the sentence “my shift key is broken” is included, failure to capitalize conveys “I am either illiterate or profoundly lazy.” Why should I assume your thinking is more informed or less lazy than your typing?
Style may be a portion of the content but what you say is infinitely more important than how you say it. And I see no connection between being a lazy typer and having a lazy mind. I assume your comment about shoes was a joke but that’s exactly how I see it. Disregarding someone’s opinion because they cannot be bothered to capitalize is exactly like disregarding their opinion because they have shoddy footwear to me. It seems to be an utterly juvenile thing to do.
I post from my PDA a lot. And it’s tough to get the caps right when typing fast (caps at the start of sentence isn’t soooo bad, but something like PDA often comes out as Pda or pda). So, I’m lazy, sue me.
Perhaps because you haven’t thought it through? 
I’‘m in the *prefer not *to *hate it *camp. And I echo Dinsdale’s & the rests’ sentiments about spelling, sentence structure, etc.
To me, a two-liner with all those sins is tolerable, provided it means something worth paying attention to. Seeing two+ paragraphs of no-caps triggers immediate tab closing.
We’re Google-indexed. Their posts *are *“in English for posterity.”
I doubt it. When I was but a pretentious young non-capitalizing thing, if someone didn’t want to read my (otherwise properly spelled and following the rules of mainstream written American English) posts, I couldn’t give a flying fuck what they thought about me.
She couldn’t just… **not **use the shift key?
That’s not quite the point. Did you care whether many people read your posts or not?
What made you start using capitals?
Anyone who cared solely about whether not I capitalized, I didn’t care about their opinion.
I grew up.
i really couldn’t care less either way. it only strikes me as “YouTubesque” if it is difficult to read. lack of punctuation, excessive punctuation (stop with the superfluous ellipses!), “lols” and the like are all annoying, but posts like these have youtube qualities regardless of whether or not they’re capitalized.
how many people skipped this post? i’m gonna need a hand count.