I Am Assuming This Is To Prevent People From Posting Annoyingly In All Caps, But There Are A Few Problems With It. As You Can See From This Post, Its Choice Of Capitalization Is Odd; Even The Shortest Individual Words Are Capitalized, But Words In (parentheses) Or Following Opening vb Tags Are Not. The Logic Seems To Be That Any Character Following A Space Is Capitalized, Which Is A Ridiculously Bad Design. Moreover, The Content Of The Vb Tags Is Counted In Determining Whether The Post Is In All Caps, So That If The Poster Copied And Pasted A Url, The Post Would Remain Capitalized. Overall, Assuming This Is Intentional, And Not A Glitch, It Seems To Be A Very Badly Designed Algorithm.
But As Is More Important, It Fails To Correct For Extremely Short Posts That Consist Only Of Acronyms (see this Example).
On The Positive Side, It Does Give One’s Posts An Old-fashioned Appearance, Which Some May Appreciate.
Is This A Known Issue And Can The Sdmb Admins Can Do Anything About It?
I Know Vbulletin Can Convert Thread Titles That Are Capitalized, But I Didn’t Know About Entire Posts Themselves. Maybe … They’re Using A Hack? I Know The Management Disdains Hacks, Or Otherwise We Vwould Be Able To Report Our Own Posts. Still, Though, It’s A Thought.
Given that, it seems logical that the feature was first added to work only on thread titles, and then, perhaps in a later version, the same code was thoughtlessly applied to entire posts. In my humble opinion, it would be a net gain to disable it, for the following reasons:
The function is next to useless anyway, as it is now, since a single lower case character, even in a vB tag, will cause the entire post to remain in upper case; and the number of full-length posts that use capitals to express hostility and that moreover do not include a single lower case character is certainly at or near zero, especially on this board where standard English is the norm. Even if such posts do exist, they are exceeded by the number using all capitals for a legitimate reason, especially, as in the example, short posts containing only an acronym.
Disabling it would ever so slightly reduce the CPU load on your servers.
I don’t know a whit about vBulletin, but since according to Wikipedia you can write plug-ins for it, it seems to me that if you wanted to have this feature and have it really work, you could write a better version with just a few lines Perl (or whatever).
Posters who find it necessary to write in all caps to express their feeling are probably better dealt with by moderators than by an automatic case converter.
Obviously, I’m not going to crusade for this to change; I’m just offering my thoughts because, it being a single and largely inconsequential check box, you probably haven’t given it sufficient thought to have considered these points.
With respect, rkts, who the heck cares? The only time it makes a difference is if someone actually tries to post in all caps, which is rare. If they did, the fact that it comes out a bit absurd looking is no big deal. :rolleyes:
Well . . . I suppose I tend to care about things that most people would not consider important. I don’t like that my post looked goofy. But I’m not arguing for them to change it, just contemplating what I would do in their situation since they probably haven’t thought much about it.
Not that you asked, but I have to agree that this function should be disabled. True, it probably affects an incredibly tiny percentage of the posts made, and I might go my entire life without this function having an impact on my posts. But that only adds fuel to the argument for getting rid of it. If this is something which is going to affect such a small number of posts, then it should be done away with. With all we ask the hamsters to do around here, anything that leaves them a bit more juice would be a good move.
Also, I’ve always thought of this as being a place where you could be free to express yourself in whatever way you see fit. IF I WANT TO POST IN ALL CAPS, THEN I SHOULD BE FREE TO DO SO!!! (and the rest of you should be free to beat me down because of it, if need be).
Actually I suspect it’s doesn’t make much of a diference on system resources one way or the other, it’s just another option in how text is displayed here.
We dislike “shouting” and hope people will be reasonable in all things. This is just another tiny tool to help keep those who leave capslock on be more reasonable.