If one or more of your posts have disappeared, here are the most likely reasons:

1. Violated one or more rules. This is the one you most want to avoid.

2. Tons of pointless one-liners. Sorry, folks, but if you come in as a new member and start posting a ton of one- or two-liners, they're going to end up being deleted. If you're new and your post count dropped a lot, fast, that's almost always the reason.

Same with posting to a lot of old threads. One member...

This one is more for the folks who are new to online discussion. It's simple, but not always obvious.

Choose your thread titles carefully.

If you post something vague and meaningless, like "Help" or "I have a problem," you're going to get a fairly random selection of people reading your post. Wheoever's curious, but that will usually be it, unless the thread catches fire for some reason. If that happens, it usually won't be the reason you wanted....

I witnessed something recently that really had me wondering what people are thinking when they get behind a keyboard.

The conversation was about why a discussion forum shouldn't be used as an article directory. The thing that was so surprising was the number of people who were trying to get some sort of hard and fast definition of an 'article.'

This wouldn't have been all that unusual normally. What made it interesting was that the person who started the discussion is a...

There are lots of dumbass things people do on lots of forums, but posting about those here is pointless. (See Stupid Forum Trick #4.)

If you want to make this place even better (hard as that may be to imagine), don't do dumb things.

Here's a list of what I see as the Top 10.


10. "Thank you, thank you. A thousand times, thank you."

Clicking the "Thank you" button and then posting a thank you in the thread, with...