So when should you start a new topic? Obviously, you’ll want to check what’s already been posted to make sure that your chosen subject hasn’t been raised before.

Having done that, if you find that you really have got something genuinely new to post about, then please start a new topic about it. Please don’t hijack an existing discussion and take it off-topic – including if it’s one you’ve started yourself! – as this only buries information and irritates other users.

Don’t forget to give your new topic a sensible subject title too.

These people are content thieves.

So are these – stealing articles from other blogs for their own benefit. They’re also known as “scrapers”.

Please don’t give them any support. And, whatever you do, don’t emulate them – people will hate you for it.

Quite a few people simply have a wild guess at the correct spelling and put (sp?) after their attempt. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell whether they’re genuinely asking for someone to give them the correct spelling, or too lazy to try to find out before posting. And often people are too polite to draw further attention to the original poster’s ignorance.

If you’re stuck for a spelling, then as a first resort you could ask someone who’s good at spelling if they know. Alternatively, if there’s no-one around, you could try looking it up in a dictionary or encyclopaedia, whether it’s online or in print – there’s a fair chance that if you have a guess, you’ll find the word eventually.

The main thing is: try to find out rather than remaining in the dark. Who knows? You might even learn something in the process!

If you’re replying to a posting in a mailing list – or indeed to an email which is part of an ongoing discussion – please consider carefully how much of the preceding discussion you need to quote in your reply.

It’s very easy to hit the reply button and write and send your own posting, forgetting that there have been several postings before yours which are all reproduced just below what you’ve typed. But this is bad practice, for at least three reasons:

1. It doesn’t look neat.
2. The reader has to scroll down to find out what the posting is replying to.
3. It makes for very long emails, particularly once you’ve got beyond the third posting – by which time you’ve got the third posting twice, the second one three times, and the original posting four times!

So do your reader(s) a favour – trim the unneeded repeat emails from your reply. Remember, if you don’t you’ll only get them all again when someone else posts…

If you’ve got a question or problem that other people might also have in the future, don’t be shy – post publicly, unless it’s a problem of a personal nature that would cause you or others genuine distress if it became public. That way, everyone can benefit from the shared knowledge and experience.

Writing an email entirely in one colour other than plain, sensible black is a bit like using stationery – it just suggests that you’re new to using email and are playing with the colours just because you’ve discovered they exist. So it’s bad for your image, especially in the office.

Some people think it’s clever to post on a forum in a different colour from everyone else because it will make their posts stand out more. Wrong. Writing entirely in bold red, blue or purple writing isn’t likely to impress anyone – it just marks the writer as an ignorant Yahoo who thinks that what they’ve got to say is more important than anyone else’s contribution. Besides, it’s self-defeating; if everyone else has the same idea then no-one’s posts are emphasised, so you end up with a psychedelic mess instead of a discussion.

Better to stick to black, unless there’s something exceptionally important in your posting that you particularly want to highlight. Important to others, that is, not to you. And even then, consider whether it’s so important that bold text alone isn’t enough to stress the point.

Let’s say the webmaster of Site A has a nice image on her site. The webmaster of Site B, casting around for eye candy to make his pages more attractive, sees the image and decides it would look good on Site B. Rather than asking Webmaster A or the original image copyright holder for permission to use the image, though, Webmaster B embeds the image into his page using Webmaster A’s server as his source.

Even if the image is subject to a free-use licence, using this kind of embedding means that every time the image is viewed, Webmaster A’s bandwidth is being used, not Webmaster B’s. This is theft, no matter how you look at it.

The same applies to forum postings; embedding a media file which is hosted on webspace that doesn’t belong to you is stealing bandwidth from the original host. Bandwidth costs money, and overuse can bring sites down.

Don’t embed files without permission.

That’s all very well for text messages, where the total number of characters was initially very limited. But there’s really no similar need in either emails or forum postings, as there’s usually no length limit. In any case, unless your readers are familiar with the set of abbreviations you’re using, they’re going to have to puzzle out the meaning – so any time you might have saved in typing your message is at their expense.

The same goes for l33t speak (“fear” becomes “ph34r”). This evolved as a coded language between gamers or hackers, and can actually take longer to type than straightforward English.

Unless you know that your reader is happy to use your particular jargon, type in plain English.

If it’s genuinely unclear to you where your chosen subject belongs, then either contact the Site Admins to ask them (if that possibility exists) or post it just once, in the board you think is most likely to be the correct one – and add a polite note to apologise in case you’ve got it wrong.

• Quote only the point or points you’re replying to;
• Quote a posting in its entirety only if it’s so short that to edit it would destroy the meaning;
• Quote from the directly preceding posting only if it’s a long one and you want to reply to a specific point or points (in which case, quote only those points).

If the immediately preceding posting is short, it will already be clear what you’re replying to. So quoting the immediately previous posting in its entirety serves no useful purpose and simply means that people reading the topic have to scroll through a lot of repeated material. Don’t do it. Ever.

On the other hand, don’t over-edit a quotation to the point where the original meaning is distorted; leave enough of the original words to keep the meaning clear, in fairness to the person whose words you’re quoting.