Posting Guidelines

[theTraveler456]

Is there somewhere I can find posting Guidelines for these forums? I mean, not just the official rules that are posted everywhere which are basically "what not to do if you don't want to get the moderators mad at you", but something more along the lines of "how to write a good post". Community formatting standards and conventions, how to make sure you're posting under the right forum, how to pick good tags, that kind of thing.

Thanks!

[5a Violista]

Is there somewhere I can find posting Guidelines for these forums? I mean, not just the official rules that are posted everywhere which are basically "what not to do if you don't want to get the moderators mad at you", but something more along the lines of "how to write a good post". Community formatting standards and conventions, how to make sure you're posting under the right forum, how to pick good tags, that kind of thing.

Thanks!

As far as I can tell, there are only four sub-forums with "style guides" that specifically address some of what you're looking for, and they're all Stickied to the top of the sub-forum. There's Roleplaying Games (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?191281-New-Roleplaying-Games-General-Forum!)'s "This board is for general roleplaying discussions and cross-edition talk. [...] If you want an answer specific to a particular edition of a particular game, please post in the appropriate subforum below.", Finding Players (Recruitment) (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?257924-Guide-to-Play-by-Post-Games)'s Guide to Play-by-Post Games, Structured Games (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?50-Structured-Games)'s Werewolf Central and Insanowar Central (giving gameplay overviews of common games in that subforum), and Free Form Roleplaying (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?166066-FFRP-Central-All-players-start-here!)'s FFRP Central which describes how to start, past and current settings, and an FAQ style guide for posting.

In other subforums, I would suggest looking for a thread that is similar to what you want to say, and see how they did it.

Tags are a relatively recent thing and as far as I know, there's no standard to them: just see how people are currently using them and use them in a similar way, I guess.

Re: making sure you're posting under the right forum: on the main forum page, every forum and sub-forum has a description of it beneath the forum's title. So, read through all the descriptions that might be remotely related, open up the forums, and see if it matches what you're looking for.

[Khedrac]

One thing worth adding: a number of forums have a stule guide that Blue Text = Sarcasm, and a lot of posters use that convention on these forums. Whilst not incorrect, it is specifically not a policy of this forum - so one should not assume that it follows (though I would avoid posting in blue lest people think you mean to be sarcastic).

[Ninja_Prawn]

Yeah, there really isn't anything like that, sorry.


"how to write a good post".

That would be very subjective, and probably vary from subforum to subforum. You could write books on the topic, if you wanted, but at the end of the day I can't think of many situations where the quality of a post really matters.

Quality of threads, on the other hand... I wouldn't mind if someone put up some guidelines for that.


Community formatting standards and conventions

You can pick most of this up as you go, to be honest. In places where standardised formatting matters (e.g. homebrew contests), I'd expect the thread initiator to provide some guidance (comme ça (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22479074&postcount=1)).

Oh, in case you hadn't realised yet, if you quote someone else's post, you can see (and copy) all the code they used.


how to make sure you're posting under the right forum

Use your common sense. People are usually pretty quick to let you know when you get it wrong. If there are multiple places that seem suitable, you're probably fine using any of them.


how to pick good tags

No one uses tags. :smalltongue:

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: As others have mentioned, there's nothing official aside from the rules, though Homebrew does get a bit of a pass on double-posting and thread necromancy by the OP; i.e. you can double-post in your own thread, and you can resurrect an old thread you started in Homebrew and World-building, but you still can't do those in someone else's thread.

For choosing the right forum, do your best. A lot of media questions might be called General Banter, but if they're media, they're media. If it's technical, it's Mad Science and Grumpy Technology. If it's an RPG question that doesn't rely on edition, or crosses edition, it goes in General...
if it relies on a specific ruleset, it either goes in one of the D&D subforums OR the Older Games subforum. Pathfinder is a d20 game and goes in the 3.x subforum. Getting subforum wrong is seldom a big issue, unless you do it consistently and pretty frequently