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.

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!

This is particularly a problem with words containing an R, at least for those English speakers who speak a version where the letter R isn’t pronounced in every instance (for example, at the end of words like “butter”) or after long vowels (words like “farm”). Many of the accents within England itself are like this; it tends not to be a problem for the Scots and Irish, or for most North Americans.

It’s not uncommon for these people to misspell words by omitting the R (and perhaps the vowel in front of it too), or by inserting one where there shouldn’t be one. Here are a couple of examples of the more common misspellings:

• Mint-condition penny blacks are much sought after [not "sort after"]
• He keeps his socks in the bottom drawer [not "draw"]
• The collection was formerly housed in the British Museum [in other words, it used to be; if you used "formally" instead, it would mean something very similar to "officially"]

If in doubt, the best thing to do is check in a dictionary, whether it’s a book or an online one.

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…

Flaunt means to show off something or to make a big show of taking pride in it. So you can flaunt your wealth (wear flashy clothes, spend money on expensive things that you then quickly discard) or flaunt your ignorance (make your lack of knowledge a point of pride, keep referring to “school of hard knocks” and “university of life”).

Flout means to deliberately disregard a rule, law or convention. So if you flout social norms, you make a conscious choice to do things that go against them.

Above all, never talk about “flaunting the rules” – it’s nonsense.

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.

• Let’s get the easy one out of the way first: two is 2 – the whole number between one and three.
• Too has two meanings: “as well” and “excessively”:
  • If you’re going shopping, can I come too? (Can I come as well?)
  • No, you can’t; it’ll be too crowded in the car. (The car will be overcrowded.)
• To is also used in two different ways:
  • One is in the general sense of “in the direction of”: for instance, “We’re going to the shops.”
  • The other is a little more difficult to explain; it’s used to introduce the basic form of a verb (like go, eat, say) that doesn’t itself have a subject. (The subject of a verb is the person or thing that’s doing the activity – like I go, you eat, Jackie Wilson says.) For instance:
    • I have to go now.
    • This used to be my favourite song.
    • He doesn’t intend to pay.

Think very carefully before adding sound to your site. Will your visitors really appreciate it, or are they more likely to yelp with pain and hit the mute button? Are you confident that the sounds genuinely do make your site a better place to visit – or have you succumbed to the newbie temptation to add all the bells and whistles you discover?

Even if you do decide to incorporate sounds, you may be well advised to turn them off as the default option and allow visitors to decide for themselves whether to give their ears the treat you’ve offered them.

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.