Quite often I see posts pointing at a mistake in a post,
correcting a previous post by the same author, or
thanking people for their answers.
While the result of those post is to improve either the
technical content of the site or its friendly atmosphere,
I believe there are easy-but-often-overlooked ways to
achieve the same result:
- instead of writing a post to correct a mistake, especially
if it is a typo and your post would not add any new
content to the thread just /msg the author in the
ChatterBox (CB). It is more
than likely that the mistake will be promptly fixed.
- instead of posting a new message with an errata, just
update the original node (possible in most sections of
the Monastery). If the update consists in more than
fixing a typo you can add it at the end of the post,
prefixed by Update:
- send thanks using /msg (note to Vroom: a nice improvement to
this feature would be to allow a list of people to be messaged
, /msg (merlyn chromatic Ovid tilly) I hate you guys,
you know too much about Perl)
I think using these tricks would lower slightly the number
of not-too-relevant posts and increase the signal/noise ratio of the site.
And if you are worried about XP's (more posts = more XP's) those kinds of post never get
much votes anyway (I know, I know, PM experts will object that by lowering $NORM they
increase the likelyhood of other posts to get XP's... let's
not go there please ;--) 2006-04-14 Retitled by planetscape, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'Increasing the Signal/Noise ration of PM'
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|