HATE this! :eek: Thank you for mentioning it! Annoys me MORE when veteran posters do it!
In a similar vein, whenever people ask for suggestions on Cafe Society, it seems like a lot of posters throw out whatever they were looking for and just post their favorite show/movie/etc.
“Hey, I’m looking for some good shows, preferably with a sci-fi bent.”
“How about The Wire, Breaking Bad, or Mad Men?”
It drives me nuts when people use the term “sir” in conjunction with this.
“You, sir, have just won the thread.”
Even worse, when they use acronyms that a newbie cannot be expected to understand.
“Check out ST:TOS, ST:TNG, SW:TCW, B5, ST: DS9, BtVS,” and so on, and so on.
This is really common in sports discussions. And, as a corollary, I hate it when person A states that the very fact that person B is still arguing against them means that they are somehow emotionally overinvolved and rattled, and therefore person A has won the argument by default.
But the thing that will make me leave a thread the fastest is when the discussion seems to devolve into being about posters’ “personas” – especially those that seem to come from old threads or even off-board – rather than the subject at hand. I don’t hold grudges and don’t much care about the digital personalities of people I’ve never met.
Israel theads.
Though at least you could conceivably get a tonne of advanced widgets from Kroger if you absolutely had to. I’m spoilering the next bit for longness and only being tangentially related to this thread:
[spoiler]There was another board I was posting on when I needed some particular clothes I couldn’t source locally, so I asked for websites that would ship internationally to Australia, and I was willing to pay up to $100 plus a little more for shipping.
First response “Wal*Mart sells clothes for $2 a pair! You could buy 50 pairs!”
What’s the first line on Wal*Mart’s “International Customers” page?
"The Walmart.com website only ships orders to addresses within the 50 states, APO / FPO military addresses, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. "
Then we scroll down:
International Websites
Argentina: www.wal-mart.com.ar
Brazil: www.walmartbrasil.com.br
Canada: www.walmart.ca
China: www.wal-martchina.com
Japan: www.the-seiyu.com
Mexico: www.walmartmexico.com.mx
Puerto Rico: www.walmartpr.com
United Kingdom: www.asda.com
Notice something that’s NOT on that list?[/spoiler]
The other thing that pisses me off, and it’s only here because I spend more time here than most other places at the moment.
When someone posts who is clearly not in the US, and gets responses like “OMG are you an insomniac? Why are you posting at that time?” or “WTF winter? It’s summer lol!”
People from other countries have been allowed on the internet for over 10 years now. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that people are occasionally posting from timezones outside yours, or in places where the seasons are different.
this
I hate
Here’s an “other” - people who start interesting threads about something that’s going on in their life, everyone gets interested and then they disappear and we never found out what happened in their particular situation.
And it’s not that they simply haven’t logged on … they’re still around, they just won’t finish what they started.
Don’t tease me like that! Even if you decide you don’t want to talk about it anymore, at least post and say so!
After a certain length, unless you are a very compelling witer, one’s eyes start to glaze over. It’s in the hope that next time you’ll try to be more concise.
When people put Hi Opal! as the 18th option instead of the 3rd one it’s pretty annoying.
So are posts that are walls of text.
People who use the term “woo” to derisively refer to anything that doesn’t fit their myopic view of medicine and science.
I also should have included the Great Wall O’ Text.
mmm
An OP that starts with “title says it all”, followed by one or more sentences demonstrating that the title did not say it all.
Og, um and its variants, arguing the example, and smilies are the main things that irk me. The smilies bothered me enough that I set up my PC to not even load them.
It bugs me when people respond to other posts by typing their contribution above the quote.
What’s arguing the example?
Threadshitting drives me right up the wall, I forgot to mention that. It really irks me when we are talking about some TV show (see the Friends thread) and some people have to come along and talk nastily about how they never watch and TV; they’re too good for it. Funny, did I ask?
But upon reading this thread it’s annoying me that people are annoyed by cat threads and the MMP. I don’t like the cat threads either but both of those are really easy to avoid; you never have to go in them and mostly are well-labelled.
The quickest thing I could think of:
The “Could a plane take off from a treadmill” thread, if the OP had said, “for example, could a Boeing 747 take off from a 5000 foot treadmill?”
and the reply was something to the extent of “You couldn’t even make a treadmill that long! And even if you did, Boeing wouldn’t allow their plane to be used in an experiment like that. You would need something like a…”
Or, more bluntly, attacking/criticizing the example instead of getting the gist of the post and answering the OP’s question.
I read the linked thread, and I still don’t know what “DTMFA” is.
Good point. In GQ a quote should be followed by logical, temperate argument. If it is nonsense, you should explain what is wrong with it, perhaps with a cite.