05-12-2003, 06:22 AM
Huh, didn't know this place still had threaded view, and I'm sort of sad to hear that. If I do multiple responses it will look stupid (and be rude to) the people who read it as one single thread, but if I put it all in one response then it almost invariably wouln't be in the proper thread. I prefer forums that have a standard viewing mode, instead of making it switchable like that.
As for your comment about lurking, bah. Generally if I haven't posted within a week of joining a forum I'm not interested in the topic and don't plan on sticking around. Posts like "I don't have the time to read this so gimme a summary" are rather rude and annoying, yes, but you don't have to lurk for weeks to avoid that! Then again I'm a fast and voracious reader, so I've usually read a page or two of threads within a week. Still, I think if someone has a comment to make, and they've read the rest of the thread, they shouldn't be afraid to make that comment just because they haven't been around for a while. It's fairly rare to have multiple threads on the same topic, unless some of them are already fairly old (in which case I wouldn't expect someone to be aware of them in general), so I don't think that a new poster needs to have read more than the thread they're responding to in order to contribute to the discussion generally.
Then again I'm the type of person that can easily read something with no punctuation (like goldfish's post), and generally dislikes the idea of enforcing a strict code of netequitte.
Anyways, that turned out longer than I expected. The point I originally wanted to make was that I think Nicodemus was too harsh. I don't think it would accomplish anything to elaborate much, so I'll just say that my problem is that he was specifically aggresive and insulting while as the other posters where merely critical and vocally annoyed about something.
As for your comment about lurking, bah. Generally if I haven't posted within a week of joining a forum I'm not interested in the topic and don't plan on sticking around. Posts like "I don't have the time to read this so gimme a summary" are rather rude and annoying, yes, but you don't have to lurk for weeks to avoid that! Then again I'm a fast and voracious reader, so I've usually read a page or two of threads within a week. Still, I think if someone has a comment to make, and they've read the rest of the thread, they shouldn't be afraid to make that comment just because they haven't been around for a while. It's fairly rare to have multiple threads on the same topic, unless some of them are already fairly old (in which case I wouldn't expect someone to be aware of them in general), so I don't think that a new poster needs to have read more than the thread they're responding to in order to contribute to the discussion generally.
Then again I'm the type of person that can easily read something with no punctuation (like goldfish's post), and generally dislikes the idea of enforcing a strict code of netequitte.
Anyways, that turned out longer than I expected. The point I originally wanted to make was that I think Nicodemus was too harsh. I don't think it would accomplish anything to elaborate much, so I'll just say that my problem is that he was specifically aggresive and insulting while as the other posters where merely critical and vocally annoyed about something.