Yes, I judge you by your formatting.

[empty_room]

And the fact that all the text of your request thread is squished to the right side of my monitor, that the thing is colour coded and covered with pink hearts, green diamonds, yellow what-ever-the-fucks makes me think you are a moron. Also a sigma is not an acceptable replacement for an e. I don't want my knowledge of cyrillic making me misread

Comments

[lefox]

THANK YOU. THANK YOU SO MUCH. This seems especially rampant on forum communities (Read this as: "Gaia."). People think if their titles and subtitles look "cooler," they'll attract more people to their threads and, sadly, a lot of the time they're right.

The worst part is? You can't search for these threads! If, for whatever reason, you want to get back to that weird-symbol'd thread because, I dunno, the person wanted one of your favorite obscure fandoms or something... you can't search for it, because you have to remember each and every goddamn symbol they used.

And yeah, then there's the symbol system. "The star means I'm craving it, the smilie face means I have a plot, this other wingding means I'll chew your head off for suggesting it so why the hell I'm even listing it is beyond me..."

[empty_room]

I actually never noticed the searching problem, hah! I guess that's pretty darn annoying too.

[lefox]

It's not so much of a problem if you have the habit of bookmarking everything that looks interesting, but I generally keep my bookmark lists very, very short, so I don't bookmark everything; I just remember a few keywords in the title and look for it later. I can't do that if the title is a bizarre assortment of weird symbols. :c

[crowsilike]

I usually end up subscribing to the weirdly symbol threads, but I often drop them again because of their complicated symbol system. Just write what you're interested in and either skip the rest or list what you don't want.

[blot]

I can kind of understand rating systems, I do a 1-5 astrik thing, and I update it often, depending on what kind of Genre I'm looking for, but I hate over formatting. I like making my threads nice and centered, with an easy to read looking font. It seems to attract more people than if I used a thousand different symbols, 4 different colors, and some crazy font.

[empty_room]

Why don't they realise that making it hard to understand makes people not want to bother? Just because it's ~pretty~ doesn't mean I want to read it.

[blot]

Exactly. Plus, some people do not know how to mix colors+background. I hate having to highlight stuff to read the post. Chances are, if I have to squint, or sit there trying to decipher that you are trying to say, I'm not gonna bother.

[crowsilike]

YELLOW ON WHITE BACKGROUND RARGH *flips table*

[faerykingcasron]

Ohhhh yes don't I know this one.

I think the worst part of formatting barf for me is once someone starts doing it, they then immediately look at you as if you're somehow beneath them for making your text, y'know, readable.

Though I can understand the craving code can come in a little handy, I've used a star system once or twice myself to indicate levels of interest. That said, once you shove enough bullshit into it it stops being instantly readable, which is basically the entire point and thus turns it into so much useless fluff.

Also please tell me this is gaia you're talking about, because if there are more sites out there that do this I will cry myself to sleep at night. ;M;

[faerykingcasron]

*Lol @ fucked-up italics.

[empty_room]

Alas. It's some silly people trying to bring gaia along with them. No problem though, I will continue to be evasive whenever they ask me for RP.

[faerykingcasron]

Oh good lord they're SPREADING? D: Quick everyone! To the bomb shelters! Don't let them bite you! And remember, SHOOT FOR THE HEAD!

[crowsilike]

Can we add "makes the character speak in a different colour/bold/italics/all at once" to the list of annoyances? I don't care how fucking pretty it is, it' completely brings me out of the RP, because it's what I read first - usually skipping at least a paragraph's worth of text because OF COURSE it's the "literate" ones who does this. The worst was the guy who used four colours in one post - black for the main prose, green for one character, bright pink for another and yellow for the last.

I should note that I don't mind if the whole text is in a different colour/font as long as it's still readable. It's when it keeps shifting that I get annoyed.

[empty_room]

Oh, yes, that is annoying too! I always check people's previous posts before RPing with them though. :P Avoids this!

[crowsilike]

I do the same as well as checking any samples they have. Makes things a bit easier.

[blot]

Was it 4 colors for 4 characters, or 4 colors for one character? Because I'm guilty of color-coding my stuff if I'm using more than one character.

[tigerpeasant]

PRETTIES=BETTER is the whole problem with Gaia. I don't care you care write Russian symbols, or LiKE ThIS~ or for your million of bizzaro song lyrics, I just want clarity!

[kerssido]

Oh yes. And the teeny tiny fonts in a light colour. With the big fat borders filled with flowers and poetry or animes. WHY PEOPLE

[elviepuppeteer]

Haha, oh man this
I usually have my system locale set to Japanese, so any non unicode character shows up as a Japanese character. It's really funny because then I read the sound/word (usually sound) and...it doesn't fit, to say the least...