Posting Guidelines

[Red5]

Posting Guidelines

This discussion forum is designed so that learners can ask questions to teachers about the English language. You can help keep it organised by sticking to a few simple rules when you post. In doing this you might well find that more people reply to your posts too!

Choose the right section for your thread
The forum is divided into sections; if there is one related to your thread, then please put the thread there. If you have a question about idioms, then use the idioms area. People interested in idioms will spend time in that section, so your thread will be seen by more people who can help. Before you start a thread, check to see whether there is a specialised area dealing with the topic.

Use Helpful Post Titles
Try to give your thread a good title; people will see the title and decide whether to open it and read it or not.

Help! or Urgent Help Required!!!!!!
Thread titles should include all or part of the word/phrase being discussed. Please don’t use phrases like "HELP!", "Urgent!", "translation please", "how do I say this", "I'm new" and similar expressions.
These are not good titles; they give no idea of what the thread is about.

Present Perfect Usage
This title is clear and people will instantly know what the thread is about. Try to include the theme or topic of the thread in the title. If you include keywords in the title, the forum software will automatically display threads with th same keywords at the bottom of the page, so you will be able to see other discussions on similar topics.

Please be patient
There are many posts on this forum every day. Please be patient when waiting for a response to your question. People come into the forum at the time of their choosing. Most questions do get answered fairly quickly, but it may take a couple of hours. We do not guarantee an instant answer. Please try to be patient as the forum gets hundreds of posts every day.

If you do get impatient waiting for an answer to your question, try sending someone a PM (private message) asking that person to respond to your post. (You might want to send more than one (to more than one person).)

Please capitalise words
Please capitalise words correctly. This is a forum dedicated to helping you learn the English language and as such, keeping to this guideline will help you and others.

Please don't post the same question more than once
Please only post a question once- if you post it several times, it can be confusing with people answering in the different threads. Duplicate posts will be deleted by the moderators

Editing & Making Revisions
When making changes, please make a new post. Please do not change things in the original.

Help! I can't see my post
Sometimes, when you submit a post, it may seem to disappear. This may happen when you submit a post with a link in it. When this happens:

Don't panic!

Your post hasn't disappeared; it has simply been moderated. The board software has detected a link, but the board software isn't intelligent enough to know if it's spam.

So the board software hides it from public view, but moderators can still read it. When the moderator has looked at the post and decides that it is not spam, he or she can "approve" the post, and then it will be visible to everybody.

Please don't try to resubmit your post. All that happens is that all your posts get moderated and queue up for approval. Just wait for a moderator to approve your post.

Start a new thread for a new question
Please don't post new questions in existing threads; start a new discussion thread. If you put an unrelated question in a thread, it makes the discussion very difficult as people will be answering different things and it is hard to follow. If the question is relevant to the discussion, it is fine, but if people are discussing modal verbs, a question about idioms can ruin the thread.

Don't put email addresses in posts
If you post some text that includes an email address, the forum software will remove it and ask you to use a PM instead. This is a simple security feature, to prevent spammers from using automated software to collect addresses [it's called 'harvesting']. We don't want to spoil your fun, but it's a nasty world out there. You can avoid any delay and/or frustration by using a PM in the first place.

Please don't use chatlish
This is a forum for discussing the English language. There is no need to write formally, but this is not a chatroom, so please write normal English, with punctuation, capital letters and words written in full; use you not u, I not i, great not gr8, etc. Don't worry about making mistakes, which is normal when learning a language, but do please try to make your English easy to read.

[Rover_KE]

Thank you Jed and Adam for this great restructuring job.



I would like to see the following (or something similar) added to the above (in the guidelines – not the rules):

Don't just post 'Thank you' or similar

Your appreciation is welcome but there is no need to write a new post to say thank you. Simply click the Like button on any posts you find helpful. It means that we don't have to open the thread again to read your new post and then find that it doesn't include any new information or an additional question.

I would like to see the following deleted:

If you do get impatient waiting for an answer to your question, try sending someone a PM (private message) asking that person to respond to your post. (You might want to send more than one (to more than one person.)

What does anybody else think?

[5jj]

I agree with both of Rover's points.

(Perhaps I should just have clicked on 'like'. )

[Raymott]

I agree strongly with Rover's second point. I remembering mentioning this a few years ago. When I discovered this guideline, I made a policy of not answering PM requests for answers unless there was a very good reason why I should. It's unnecessarily intrusive, and asking several people at once through PM, I consider plain rude.
Maybe there's some historical reason for the guideline.

[emsr2d2]

That's a great set of guidelines.

One query - regarding thread titles, is "Present Perfect Usage" really a helpful title? I realise that it cause similar threads to show up at the bottom but it doesn't include some/all of the words being queried. Surely if we accept the names of tenses as thread titles, then people might continue to use titles such as "Prepositions" or "Dates and Times" and similar. I'm pretty sure that on occasion I have told users that "Present Perfect" (or similar) is not an appropriate thread title and that it should actually include a part of the sentence which contains the present perfect usage.

I thought that the point of relevant thread titles wasn't just to bring up similar threads but also so that we (as responders) can go back and find threads in the long list quite easily by recognising the thread title. I would be much more likely to remember replying to "I have been a builder for ten years" than "Present Perfect Usage". They can, of course, be directed to try searching for "Present Perfect" in the Custom Search box.

[Rover_KE]

Yes, ems. I strongly agree with that.