Terms of Use

[Morpheus42]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

(loud wailing) No, Morpheus, no. Don't even go there!

G0 Wh3r3 ??

[scalem X]

How about forbidding posts with a ratio of over 50% numbers ?
On all parts except the science part .

I was thinking. We seem to have "strict" (okay say: real) rules now.
How about some list of things we encourage as well as funny 'rules'.

-Don't leave the door to the tea room open, people catching a cold there is the last thing we want. With all the traffic all of the boards can get sick. Thank you.
-We encourage making friends here; you know: the kind off people you don't beat up after schooltime. The kind of people that can walk into your home and not get shot? No? well get them here then those people.
-...

[CarlottaVonUberwald]

- do not feed the inmates

[the smiling weirwood]

And no setting fire to trees or monkeys.

[Paige Turner]

Originally Posted by the smiling weirwood

And no setting fire to … monkeys.

Oh, great. I just bought a whole case of Munk-E-Lite©.

[Morpheus42]

Originally Posted by Paige Turner

Oh, great. I just bought a whole case of Munk-E-Lite©.

You want to trade it for my lumberjack-axe ?

[steve12553]

Originally Posted by Mithrandir

Oo-er, just realised that, having said that, I use them myself - but only on mobile phones!

Just a thought. If it's a phone, why not talk on it?




Just a thought. Maybe I'm too much of a Trogladyte.

[Teresa Edgerton]

I had this strange sensation for a moment that I had inadvertantly wandered into the lounge.

But then it occurred to me that a temporal and spatial warp had just transferred several of the lounge folk into this thread in the middle of one of their typical light-hearted conversations.

To return to the topic at hand: as much as I love this place, if I had to wade through message after message written in txt msg or leet cypher, I'm afraid it would put me right off these forums.

Perhaps age has atrophied my ability to adapt to new ways, but I have enough problems making sense of things written without capitalization or punctuation. Add in all those 4's and u's and ne's, those weird abbreviations (often of words that are misspelled to begin with), plus other attempts to write in code instead of plain English, and reading becomes a real chore.

It may be, of course, that those who post such messages feel they have nothing to say to an old fuddy-duddy like me.

[the smiling weirwood]

Originally Posted by Morpheus42

You want to trade it for my lumberjack-axe ?

How about trading it for some Branches-n-yo-Face?

[j. d. worthington]

Ummm, not to be a stick-in-the-mud, but we really have rather derailed the thread... So perhaps it would behoove us to get back onto the topic at hand once more.

I am all in favor of making txt msg completely verboten around here, as I find it a genuine pain-in-the-fundament... nor does it encourage any of our aspiring writers to write more carefully, for that matter. The more lax the use of language in a literarily-based site, the less worthwhile the writing on such a site will become.

[littlemissattitude]

Teresa and j. d., you both make excellent points.

Being an old fuddy-duddy myself, I don't hold much with text messaging style communications. Maybe it is because I studied my spelling lessons very hard when I was in school and I expect others to have done so as well. Maybe I'm just getting more OCD as I get older...second thought, no maybe about that. But I just don't feel inclined to decipher anything in text messaging style.

Also, while I'm sure that if no one has published a novel entirely in text messaging style yet, it will happen soon, I seriously doubt that publishing is headed in that direction as a general practice. So, as a site that takes literary pursuits seriously, I don't think text messaging style really has a place here.

[steve12553]

Also when you get to a certain age you've seen at least four word combination for every possible abbreviation. They mean more than one thing to me and context doesn't always help. The key strokes are free. Please use them. Type it out. Tell us what you mean.

[scalem X]

Brings me up to another serious (yes sorry to start randomness previously) topic. How about the usage of other languages.
I remember or think off:
-Talking in Latin to Esioul, to laugh with the "plebis Barbarorum"
-Some People using Dutch for secret lounge messaging
-Submitting stories or poems in other languages than English in the Critiques section (Yes, I plead both guilty and Insanity)
-Using other languages in private messages to make stuff easier (and to avoid the moderator's spying eye moeahahaa , damn maybe I shouldn't be giving people ideas )

[I, Brian]

Limited use of other languages shouldn't be a problem, especially when used in fun.

[steve12553]

Klingon, of course.