Here are some guidelines to help you make the most of your GD experience.

The general discussion is for fairly light hearted discussion, anything too heavy is better suited for the Debates subforum.
Threads of a more personal nature are better suited to Life Issues.
But anything too spammy is liable to get locked, it's all about finding the correct balance.

The main thing to bear in mind is that it's all about discussion, your thread has to give people something to talk about.

A simple rule of thumb is this; if your thread is only getting single word or extremely short responses, then it's a bit spammy and is probably going to end up being locked.

What's your favourite..? threads
These rarely encourage much conversation, people tend to just post a short response and move on, and so these are not really what the GD is about.

This or That threads

These also rarely encourage conversation, so we'd like to avoid these too.

Quizzes

A big no-no, we don't allow quizzes to be posted, again because people just post their answers and move on, but mainly because people cheat by pasting questions from elsewhere, and gaining gold for something they haven't written themselves.
If you want to post a quiz, you need to do it in the Word Games forum, where gold earning is disabled.

Spoons!

Spoonfeed questions are something people add to the end of their post, to clarify their points and get specific answers.
Sometimes people choose to only respond to these questions and ignore any other points brought up by your post.

It is entirely up to you if you add these questions or not, but here's a couple of things to bear in mind:

• Adding spoons to your post can often limit the amount of discussion your topic will produce, as people frequently just answer the questions with short responses and move on.
• If you're going to add spoons to your post, you MUST add a note at the end to tell people that if they are going to paste your questions into their post to answer them, they have to be within the quote tabs, these--> [QUOTE][/QUOTE] as people cannot earn gold for something that they didn't write themselves..

Thread necroing

This is posting in very old threads(6 months or older). Please don't do this! In this forum, it's really not necessary, and usually the topic is no longer relevant either. Far better to create a new thread on a similar subject and get some fresh conversation going, than post in one about something that happened months ago.

Lists of questions

Posts consisting solely of a list of questions are something else which we really don't want to see. Again because they don't encourage conversation.

Here's an example:

User A writes:

What would you do if..

1) Your best friend suddenly became deeply religious.
2) You caught your 12 year old sister taking drugs.
3) You come home from school and find someone has shot your dog.
4) Your Mum ate all the ice cream when she knew you wanted some.
5) Your Dad had committed a crime and someone else had gone to jail for it.
6) Your parents decide to move to another country and take you away from your school and friends.
______________________________
User B responds:

1) dunno
2) not got a sister
3) I dun like dogs
4) greedy bish
5) lulz, my dad's a gangsta!
6) whatever, hate school anyway.
______________________________

See, this doesn't help to get discussion going at all.
A far better way to do things, would be to create a seperate topic for each question; expanding apon each one, and actually give people something solid to talk about.

Doing that will benefit everyone, the OP will gain far more for creating 6 seperate, well thought out threads instead of just one with minimal content.
The people who respond will be more likely to give longer, meaningful responses; and to stick around and discuss the subject instead of just giving a short answer and leaving.
Everyone wins!

Repeat threads

Please do make an effort to check for an existing thread before you create one on any subject. We're don't expect you to hunt through the entire forum, we're not complete monsters but we do get a bit mad when people make a thread about a subject that's still on the front page.

If you could take a minute to check back through 4 or 5 pages first, we'd very much appreciate it!

Also, threads with topics too similar to one that already exists will be locked. For example, if there's already a thread discussing dreams then making a thread that discusses dreams about cows will be locked and you will be asked to continue your discussion in the existing thread.

We would also appreciate it if you, when making a new thread, could chose a thread title that is as descriptive as possible. This is not a must but bear in mind that if the thread title doesn't specify what the discussion is about we might edit it and add a key word to it to make it more clear what the thread is about.


If you've got down here and have actually read all of this THANK YOU!!!

This thread will be left unlocked, so people can ask questions, comment and complain etc..

Good guide, hopefully this will help to cut down on spam and pointless threads that don't encourage discussion. Thanks jelly! :D

Very helpful jelly!

Though I'm seeing a lot of repeat threads on the Kira thing. Just want to point that out. Kill me if this is not the right place.

Didn't actually notice this thread until you mentioned it over at the CD. But this is a great guide. Although if people would actually read this there would be less spam.

I agree that this is very helpful :3 I had no idea what "Spoons" were until you explained it to me (well, not directly to me, but you get the gist )

I will need to post a lot to get the items I want (I can't spend that much time on the computer, though, due to my illness )- so I will try my best to follow your guidelines!!

MeOw!
>^..^<

Just wondering, is there a rule against necro-ing threads? Like, don't post in a thread older than, say, 2 months or something?

There is, thank you for reminding me, I did spot someone earlier who'd posted in a thread from last July..but the comment they added was relevant so I let it go.
But I'll still never understand why people intentionally root in the back pages of a forum for threads to post in

It's so helpful, thank you Jelly.

That is very helpful thanks Jelly!

Hey, you're welcome, not that anyone takes a blind bit of notice of it...

Aww, that's not true. 0.000000001% do.

*pokes Howdy with a pickle*

Here are some guidelines to help you make the most of your GD experience.

If you've got down here and have actually read all of this THANK YOU!!!

This thread will be left unlocked, so people can ask questions, comment and complain etc..

The part about reading ''all of this''.......does skim-reading count? Thanks for the explanations, I had never even heard of a lot of those post-things, but it doesn't take a genius to realize I'm new. More or less. However, you left out the part of how to make a quote in the last bit about spooning. This is just my amateur attempt, so let's hope it works. Here goes nothing and hopefully I won't mess up the forums too much.

Hey it worked! Awesome!! Let's hope whatever I try next will.....

Thanks for the information there Jellysundae, really helpful. And I read all that so your more than welcome xD

This is very helpful, I didn't know so many things were in the rule book, luckily now I have read these I know what is and is not allowd, thank you very much for bringing it to my attention!