Time for the ever-so-annoying official Word Of Mod!

Aug 21, 2006 11:18

Hey there folks. Recently there's been a lot of posts that have been... lacking. In a couple departments.

I realize that we have about 8355 members, (holy crap, really? Wow, I gotta check the userpage more often) and more every day, it seems.

So a lot of you are new to this thing, and I'm not sure how to put it, but... STFUNOOB maybe there's some stuff that's getting quoted that's just been seen a million times before, or some issues you may not be aware of. Here's some of our thinking behind deletions and mod work that will help you, the quoters, know some common pitfalls to avoid:

The latest movie/book/sex scandal? If it's already mentioned once or twiceteen times on the first twenty meta's, any more may be beating it into the ground. The motherfucking ground, to be precise right now, but in the past, this has included Hogwartian ground, Brokeback ground, and the Caribbean water.

People talking in LJeet speak or chattalk is not automatic grounds for funny, even if it is Tony Blair. Especially if it's Tony Blair. At this point, as an American, I wouldn't be half surprised if Tony Blair spoke in nothing but sentence fragments surrounded by asterisks.

People acting stupid is not funny. There's plenty of comms for that (mock_the_stupid comes to mind, along with wtf_inc) so take it there. This is a fine line, obviously, but if you're thinking, "Haha, folks have got to see this, it's so dumb it's funny!" this is the wrong place.

Do us a big favor. If you ask someone to quote something they've written, and they say, Sure, but I got it from an e-mail forward, or Okay, but I stole it from ______, it's not original. I don't know why, but even when people are told this, they're not paying attention.

On that note, if three people tell you you've posted something unoriginal? "Oh, I didn't know. Oh well," is not the correct response. Deletion is. If you're curious how to delete a post, just hit Edit, then at the bottom, there's a Delete Entry button. Easy peasy.

Crediting a post means you actually provide a link to where that quote is. Just giving a journal name doesn't cut it.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the exchange rates are lousy. Just don't.

Quoting syndicated feeds of people paid to be smart and funny is no better than typing up Jay Leno's monologue from the night before. This is always a hotly contested and subjective thing, obviously, but these things tend to go in circles- someone posts something from a wonderful professional writer, who then gains a bunch of new fans, who then feel compelled to quote everything. I think we can all file this under 'beat into the ground,' okay?

Yes, we delete first and ask questions later for QWP posts without QWP actually written in them. This is to save the OPs' privacy as much as possible just in case they didn't want something posted here.

Okay... I think that covers most of the problems we've been seeing recently. As I've said before, we mods do this for shits and giggles, and we definitely prefer the giggles. So keep on quotin', folks. Just... let's be a bit more selective.

Thank you, and we now return you to your regularly scheduled lunacy.
Previous post Next post
Up