Posting on forums.freebsd.org quite a hassle

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DutchDaemon said:
I just sent this on to my (American) wife. She's laughing so hard she's foaming at the mouth.
Is she mad? Usually "foaming at the mouth" means someone is angry.
 
PS. The first day I came here, DutchDaemon gave me for welcome 5 infractions :e :e :e I made 10 posts in 2 hours without style/formating, questions without reading first the documentation and I was completely inexcusable. Don't take nothing personal. All admins and Mods here want the best for FreeBSD, for the forum and the community. Maybe sometimes they are strict but this is only for good reason. Maybe you don't believe me but a clean forum and a good community is the 50% of a good Operating System. FreeBSD forum is one of the best organized forums and trust me. I am in a dozen of forums and none of them is not so shiny and clean
 
fonz said:
... After all, nobody's perfect. The key is to not read too much into it. What's more (speaking from the moderators' side of the fence): it's easier to spot errors made by others than to write something that is entirely error-free yourself.

This got me smiling, remembering one occasion which is a perfect example of this.

One night, it must have been about one or two in the morning, we tried to get one friend out of his chair to join us in our quest to destroy as much beverages in reach as possible. So we arrived at his home, having spent some long hours on our task already, looking for his support. And the support of one or two lamp posts ;)

But he was busy trying to find some bug, he had spent hours and hours to narrow it down, and until he found it he would not come. So I looked at his screen, swaying a bit, pointed a finger at a line and asked "You sure about this?". for(char i=0; i < 1024; i++) was staring me in the face.

So yes, it is true that others see errors you make much better than you. Because seeing is believing, but sadly believing is also seeing. You know this is so-and-so, and you then see what you think expect there. Big parts of science is to unlearn this and see what's there.

But to accept this, take the correction and not being offended requires something. You need to be able to see other things as more important than you, your dignity, your street credit, whatever. That's one thing that makes many posters here relaxing. Not many here take it personal when they get corrected, the message is more important than the messenger. People with four-digit post counts get corrected and do not throw a fit, so why should I get annoyed? Relax.

There are no turf wars about which gimmick is absolutely better than any other and other juvenile stunts which are akin to chest beating. You get corrected, yes. Some days ago I reverted an edit from a moderator on one of my posts because it changed the meaning of the message. Doing so with an explanation should not offend him, and I am confident he does not mind. Maybe he looked it up and found new (or rather old) interesting things new to him.
 
fonz said:
[Directed at the reader in general, not at anybody in particular.]

What's more, the key mantra is to not take it personal when your post is edited. We generally try to do our moderation work as unobtrusively as possible. We don't highlight every little correction, nor do we put remarks under every post we edit. And we certainly don't edit posts just "because we can", because we like being pedantic or because we don't like someone .
Well, I admit I had a hard time here before this has been clarfied. Now I feel a lot better, as it is just a normal reaction that one feels picked on, when you are being always corrected when having written "I" with a small letter. Can a newcomer read this elsewhere i.e in a welcome message?
 
Erratus said:
Can a newcomer read this elsewhere i.e in a welcome message?
When you sign up you get an e-mail and a private message detailing the rules. Problem is, nobody reads them.
 
sk8harddiefast said:
I am in a dozen of forums and none of them is not so shiny and clean

Hmm, this is true! A lot of work has to be done to achieve this. So I do worry about the daemons doing this all the time as even a well known avatar changed his color from an unhealthy green to an even unhealthier kind of yellow. I cannot but remember The Myth of Sisyphus:
As a punishment for his trickery, King Sisyphus was made to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Before he could reach the top, however, the massive stone would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again. The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for King Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself. Zeus accordingly displayed his own cleverness by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from King Sisyphus before he reached the top which ended up consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration. Thus it came to pass that pointless or interminable activities are sometimes described as Sisyphean.
Not that I want to point to an useless effort. No! But it certainly is an unending frustration doing all this manually ever and ever again. Shouldn't we take care of our good daemons and develop something like a FreeBSD-Forum-Parser before they are getting burnt out?
 
I used to feel that way in the beginning however now I realise the site administrators and the whole of the FreeBSD movement want to make FreeBSD look as professional as possible.

I hope everyone here has made a donation of cash to the cause. I missed the deadline but I donated!
 
I'm ambivalent about it; on the one hand, I applaud the moderators for the sheer workload in parsing every single post for errors but on the other, I wonder if that effort could not be better spent responding to requests for help instead of making grammar and spelling corrections.
 
I seriously doubt that the moderators have the answer for each and every question asked here (although they seem to help out whenever they can). It sure makes it easier for me as a member of the community to be able to help out if I see questions that I can read and understand, and I too applaud the moderators for their work in making that happen.
 
As far as I know moderators are hired only to moderate. Of course they do know a lot about FreeBSD and are capable of providing help but it should not be treated as given that they are always available for that.
 
For the different highlights in use on the forum, I have a simple proposition : colourize the buttons in the editor with the same colours the text will appear. That way, the newbies will be able to concentrate on the spelling and grammar.
 
kpa said:
As far as I know moderators are hired only to moderate. Of course they do know a lot about FreeBSD and are capable of providing help but it should not be treated as given that they are always available for that.

The moderators are paid to edit posts in this forum? I perhaps wrongly assumed that the moderators volunteered their time and efforts to maintain our forum. On occasion I get upset about the moderation here, but, I am coming to terms with my posts being edited. I am happy to be a member here.
 
I understand your feeling, but I understand the moderators and admins too. I'm learning English, and sometimes my posts are edited for obvious reasons but I don't take it personally, in fact, they help me to learn by doing that.

I hope to learn fast to not give them too much work, heh. A clean well-formatted post is so much easier to read by people who are learning English.
 
Come one people, `&' does not need correcting to 'and'. I could invoke a certain Internet law in various ways here, but won't. Suffice to say that some people here seem to have a vision on what is `correct' language and what ain't[1]. Firstly, that's not how language works. While there is obvious incorrect language, this is definitely not in that domain. Secondly, forcing your particular view of language on other contributors is bordering on abuse of that power. This is not a school. Imagine someone would have done that to Shakespeare, James Joyce? I know we're not writing a book here, but come on, use some sense & and allow other people to use language at they want to.

Also, striking text through and putting the `correct' version after that, or marking corrections as bold, is bloody annoying. Like we're a bunch of school children.

[1]: This is a joke. Do not correct this.
 
Carpetsmoker said:
Come one people, `&' does not need correcting to 'and'.
It tends to trip up automated translators such as Google Translate, Babelfish etc. That's why it's mentioned in the forum rules, which BTW I didn't write. Moreover, there's quite simply no reason to use that kind of "txtspk" shorthand. It gives the impression that the poster was just too lazy to use normal words.

Carpetsmoker said:
Also, striking text through and putting the `correct' version after that, or marking corrections as bold, is bloody annoying. Like we're a bunch of school children.
Agreed. That's why we try to limit that to repeated instances of things that are quite clearly mentioned in the forum rules. In fact, most moderators refrain from doing that altogether.
 
Perhaps you aren't taking into account the "language" of HTML, where that ampersand can do strange and wonderful things when it's placed next to other characters. I would avoid it in any text at all times.
 
ljboiler said:
Perhaps you aren't taking into account the "language" of HTML, where that ampersand can do strange and wonderful things when it's placed next to other characters. I would avoid it in any text at all times.
This forum, like most others, does not allow direct use of HTML in posts, so this should not be a problem. It's a fair point, nonetheless.
 
fonz said:
Carpetsmoker said:
Come one people, `&' does not need correcting to 'and'.
It tends to trip up automated translators such as Google Translate, Babelfish etc. That's why it's mentioned in the forum rules, which BTW I didn't write. Moreover, there's quite simply no reason to use that kind of "txtspk" shorthand. It gives the impression that the poster was just too lazy to use normal words.

It's not `txtspk'. It's commonly accepted language, which google translate can handle fine (I tested it, wasn't able to `break' it). You may not like it, and that's fine, I don't like the word `Blog' for instance, and cringe whenever I see it used. I don't go around correcting people though (even if I had the ability).

fonz said:
Carpetsmoker said:
Also, striking text through and putting the `correct' version after that, or marking corrections as bold, is bloody annoying. Like we're a bunch of school children.
Agreed. That's why we try to limit that to repeated instances of things that are quite clearly mentioned in the forum rules. In fact, most moderators refrain from doing that altogether.

Well, If something needs to communicated, then it can also be done directly, instead of these almost passive aggressive inline comments. It certainly doesn't improve readability, and I believe that improving readability is the whole point of this.

ljboiler said:
Perhaps you aren't taking into account the "language" of HTML, where that ampersand can do strange and wonderful things when it's placed next to other characters. I would avoid it in any text at all times.

You've missed the point, this is just an example I encountered today, where a post had an ampersand striked through, and had `and' put after it. I've had contents (not tags added) changed before, but that was some time ago (haven't been active for a while).

It's the changing of *content* I take particular exception to, especially if it's not obviously wrong, such as `ive run this app b4 fbsd9 w/o lulz', or somesuch. I can guarantee you that none of my posts contain anything even remotely similar to this (well, not since I was 15 anyway, but that was a long time ago).
 
Carpetsmoker said:
It's the changing of *content* I take particular exception to
First things first (the rest will come later): it is obviously NEVER any moderator's intention to change the meaning of what someone writes. In case of an odd sentence structure or really bad English this can occasionally happen (and in the latter case chances are that the users simply expressed themselves in such a way that their words suggested something different than what they really meant to say) and if it does, do not hesitate to contact the forum staff immediately.
 
I don't understand this discussion. I'm an informal person, but I don't understand people who go on fire over a few text modifications and at the same time don't understand the maniacal correction of every little informal text.

I try to keep my FreeBSD machines at best, so what I'm interested in is the technical content of the posts, thanks to the forum moderators I can understand what is written here. Yes, an ampersand/and cannot change the meaning of a sentence. But @Carpetsmoker, you really feel bad only because of this small thing?

What I never understood is all the discussion related to bike painting and sheds. Every here and there it pops up mingled with technical or OT discussions. Perhaps those posts are written in perfect English but the meaning is obscure to me.
 
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fonz said:
First things first (the rest will come later): it is obviously NEVER any moderator's intention to change the meaning of what someone writes. In case of an odd sentence structure or really bad English this can occasionally happen (and in the latter case chances are that the users simply expressed themselves in such a way that their words suggested something different than what they really meant to say) and if it does, do not hesitate to contact the forum staff immediately.

Thank you, @fonz. I will keep this in mind.
 
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Now, the only reason I'm responding is because I actually care about this crazy place and because @Carpetsmoker lives in the same country as I do (which might help me to better picture the whole issue considering that we (probably) use the same native language).

Having that out of the way; I think this isn't the right place to discuss all this. And I'm not saying so because it's in the rules somewhere, but because I honestly believe this. Thing is; this won't solve anything. You feel strongly about the use of the & character; I could then weigh in that during my (almost) one year stay and hundreds of responses I don't even recall ever using this character myself, apart from shell script related posts I suppose. Leading up to a totally pointless and fruitless discussion or maybe even worse. It's really not worth it.

Another problem; let's say a moderator now publically agrees here. Sure, you should be able to use your & character. What if (note the if, this is just a theory of mine) this is then picked up by "others" and & gets (ab)used all over the place? Of course when being changed back they all point back to the public thread: "But x said we could!".

As said it's just a (far fetched?) theory and I'm sure also nothing the moderators won't be able to handle. But it will make their lives harder for a while, and in my personal opinion (no offense intended here); it's basically for nothing.

If you have a beef with how your message got changed then take it up with the moderator who changed it in person; using a private message. If you can back up your claim and also make some good arguments as to why you feel that particular aspect shouldn't have been changed then chances are high that the specific part in your message will be changed right back again. This has happened to me only once (if I recall correctly), but most certainly not more than two times.

Edit: And if the moderator doesn't agree with your arguments then I'm quite sure that you will be given some counter-arguments in return. So at least you'll know why your message got changed and based on what grounds. If that's the case then I think you really have little options left. In the end it is their playground after all. I suppose you could then check for moderators versus administrators, but if you've reached that point then I personally would say it's time for some serious self-reflection as well. But that's just my personal opinion.

However, if you're commenting on someone else's messages then, once again no offense intended here, I don't think you have much grounds to complain. After all; it wasn't even your message in the first place. I've also had parts of a message struck out (when I just got here), and I suppose that if I'd really want to I could simply edit that post and remove all of that myself. Problem solved.

Thing is: I don't want to. Because every time I went over that post (I don't recall which one, and I can't be bothered to look it up) it reminded me: "Oh yeah; FreeBSD instead of fbsd or freebsd" (self moderation at work ;)). And it probably also set an example to others who read my post: "Aha, they really want you to use the proper writing..."

Mission accomplished in my opinion. In the end we all benefit.

As to your particular comment on the Ampersand character; I think it depends on context but personally I wouldn't have a problem with it. Bottom line here is not to take any of this personally, because it isn't. This isn't only about you or about being "right" or "wrong"; it's also trying to make this place more accessible for others as well. And that's where the Dutch heritage comes in: what maybe pretty common or normal English for us can be totally arcane or "difficult" for others.

Just my take on this particular matter, and also my only take. As said; in my opinion it's not very beneficial to discuss such topics in public, for reasons I shared above.
 
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ShelLuser said:
If you have a beef with how your message got changed then take it up with the moderator who changed it in person; using a private message. If you can back up your claim and also make some good arguments as to why you feel that particular aspect shouldn't have been changed then chances are high that the specific part in your message will be changed right back again. This has happened to me only once (if I recall correctly), but most certainly not more than two times.

Edit: And if the moderator doesn't agree with your arguments then I'm quite sure that you will be given some counter-arguments in return. So at least you'll know why your message got changed and based on what grounds. If that's the case then I think you really have little options left. In the end it is their playground after all. I suppose you could then check for moderators versus administrators, but if you've reached that point then I personally would say it's time for some serious self-reflection as well. But that's just my personal opinion.

I used a PM. I was ignored. I will leave it at that.
 
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