Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-4787191-20130219053252/@comment-454133-20130221061209

Those rules seem sane to me (HEY! Stop QUESTIONING my SANITY!). Some consistency and rules will generally improve the experience for everyone, so long as they rules are fair and not enforced heavy-handedly arbitrarily. Speaking of... for the next few days, I will be watching my house closely. ;)

My recommendations:

1) Each forum section should more clearly describe its use on the main Forums page.  The News & Announcements entry on the main page, for example, gives no indication right now that it's where people should post votes.  This would help a lot with directing people to the right places early on, whereas now we're all just left to guess.  And some of us are bad guessers.  :)

2) Each forum section should have a blurb at the top, just a paragraph, describing any section-specific and overarching rules.  Tutorials would say right at the top that you should link to the machine that's the focus of your tutorial (if applicable), your tutorial should include at least a paragraph and a couple of pictures, and should be written clearly enough for a newbie or an 8-year old to waddle in and understand it fairly easily.

That failing, each forum section should have a single sticky thread that explains its rules and expectations, and probably refers people to other forum sections for things that don't belong there (For example, "Rule 3) No Polls: Those belong in the News & Announcements section").

I don't know if these forums support stickies, but they do appear to have the text at the top, which could be easily expanded to a paragraph without being too intrusive or unattractive. This is often how other forums handle these very concerns. At the very least, add a link (at the top of every forum section) to this post or another that clearly lays out the forum rules. That will keep the forum descriptions to one line each, and will give people a place to link to when directing accidental offenders to the rules.

3) Spell-checking is a beast on these forums, as they appear to disable Chrome & Firefox's embedded spellchecker.  I fall prey to its treachery fairly often.  Please don't nuke my house!  I worked so hard on it!

Unfortunately, that's probably more the doing of Wikia itself and not in the Tekkit wiki's control. However, a quick and even sedentary scan of one's own post before and/or after posting usually reveals the huge, glaring mistakes. I suspect most people simply never read what they write.

I apologize in advance for any spelling or grammar errors in my own post. I blame.... society. Always society.