You do make a good case. If *that *board’s staff is against this, then likely we should not be. Pretty much the SDMB is the complete opposite to that board .
I change my vote.
hell let us never use caps or punct again
Exactly. While I admit that personally I think habitual textspeak might merit an instaban, I don’t think a formal rule is necessary. Few if any posters who write that way last very long around here. They either violate other rules and get banned, change their behavior, or lose interest and wander away.
The OP made me Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there!
While you’re at it, Rhythmdvl, why not ask to ban all forms of slang, abbreviations, acronyms and typos?
IANAL but ISTM that yer idea is teh stoopid. IMO yer trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist.
<snaps fingers>
Wait! I got it! Maybe we could require all posters to show an ID before they post, too! Surely a SDMB Poster ID rule would solve some sort of problem, wouldn’t it?
There are a bunch of new posters boasting about their unusual life choices, who are brazen and seemingly revel in being mocked.
Text speak annoys the hell out of me. lower case for some reason doesn’t. But lack of paragraphs and the inability to delete non relevant parts of quotes are likewise infuriating.
If y’all want to pay me $50/hour to edit posts, I’ll be happy to do so.
As long as I’m functioning as a volunteer, hell to the no.
twickster, MPSIMS and Cafe Society moderator
No matter what rules and standards we have or don’t have, some posters will find special ways to annoy the crap out of people.
I agree, I do think it should be a rule. Capitalization and no text speak. It’s not that hard to follow.
The internets are veritably brimming with places for that kind of nonsense, I think we should choose to be otherwise.
Too hard for the mods to enforce? Really? Because it happens that often? Not seeing it, truly.
They have no problems with you can say this word but not that word, in this forum but not that forum, but this is too difficult?
I’d much rather they ended text speak and no capitalization, and let everyone swear instead!
But I’m sure they won’t do it. Why bother? If it drives people away, their job gets easier. And I’m pretty sure it will, in fact, drive people away. I wouldn’t have stayed if I’d seen text speak, when I came here, that’s for sure.
Darn, you’ve figured out our secret plot to drive people away from a message board we hang out at so we won’t have to do a job we volunteered to do.
Maintaining the policy we’ve always had is going to drive people away? How do you figure?
I support the new rule. Textspeak when not texting is annoying. We should strive to be better than that.
(I use full words and sentences on those few occasions when I text.)
Get banned, did you?
No, in seriousness, I don’t post over there because the moderation style makes me want to burn things. But that one rule, I do like.
I blame the phenomenon of Textspeak on the end of teaching cursive in school. It’s a slippery slope.
I’m a member of a forum that filters text speak into self-abuse. For instance, if I were to write LOL on there, it would automatically convert it into ‘I smell of spunk’.
Works surprisingly well.
I agree 100% with the OP, but I don’t see how those rules would be enforced. The sad fact is that text-style posts are going to become more common as more people access the board via mobile devices. I fear we’re already on slippery slope.
Nope. I got warned. For calling a re-capper a 'reviewer". :rolleyes: But my buddy got banned, just for disagreeing with a “re-capper”. Seriously, he showed me his post and the insta-ban that resulted from it. :eek:
“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while”. 
I support the OP, provided the mods find it helpful.
Oh. I thought the rule might represent a convenient shortcut. Has there ever been a effective fighter of ignorance who first posted in leetspeak, only to later reform? Would the rule have a downside that we can document?*
Not always. One guy a couple of months back consistently evaded capitalization. It took months to get rid of him, before his kinda sorta trollishness crossed a line. But then again, if the mods don’t think this is a big problem, then I defer. I conceive the OP’s proposal as a labor saving scheme.
- Well there are always downsides. Specification is one of them: how much textspeak is excessive? Plus any new rule creates drama. Maybe we could merely reach a rough board consensus that -hypothetically- if a moderator imposed standard capitalization on certain snowflakes, that the consternation would be limited and the rejoicing nontrivial.
And some people will be annoyed by totally innocuous things that others do, like the OP.
If it’s annoying, then it’s not innocuous. And it is annoying.
That does happen sometimes. On the other hand, when a poster does something that annoys a bunch of people and insists on doing it, it shows kind of a lack in sensibility and comes off as less innocuous.
TL:DR
I’m not sure what to make of the OP.
The medium is Internet, Internet has it’s own lingo. YMMV.
Are we getting rid of abbrv. as well?
What’s next, do we get rid of contractions as well?
Eye dew knot sea watt ewe mien at awl.