tepples wrote:
I have sometimes silently made corrections to spelling, grammar, or mechanics in other users' posts for the benefit of others reading the posts.
I'd just like to add ... fixing people's grammar and spelling mistakes is never going to end well.
Half the people will be offended you've done it, and the other half will take it as encouragement that they don't have to bother with grammar at all, because someone else will fix it for them.
In my own case, I stopped bothering to post on forums.freebsd.org because the moderators made this system with around 20 custom phpBB tags that only exist on their board for things like "this text is the name of a command-line utility", "this text is the name of a man page entry (and it must have the # that's associated with them present)", etc. Which certainly does make things easier for people who spend a
lot of time on said forum and understand the tags.
But, the mods would correct your posts if you neglected to do it, and would leave snarky comments in the "reason for editing" field. It made me feel I was causing too much work for them, but I didn't want to learn 20 new custom phpBB tags, so eventually I just stopped posting there instead.
Going back to my own forum, I've had to deal with this three or four times (my forum has 1/6th the members yours does, but close to the same number of active ones, so this isn't
too common an issue), but I'll get these people who just have zero regard for grammar and spelling.
I'm fully tolerant of English as a second language types. Being someone who has spent years studying a second language, I know how hard it is. And I know what a clusterfuck English is.
But I'll get these people that post utter shit like, "lol idk y r u mad?", and I will ask them to please refrain from teenage cellphone text slang. That alone would be fine, but these types always seem to be the ones to
completely ignore me. After asking them politely several times (three or more), and having them ignore me
immediately after, I've gotten fed up and banned two of them.
And now there are a few people on my forums that like to point out that I ban people just for spelling mistakes. But that was never my intention. It was more for being completely ignored repeatedly. When you're a moderator/admin and you ask someone not to do something, everyone else sees that. And when someone blows you off completely time and time again, it gives the impression that you have no authority or backbone. Ironically, if you
don't then ban someone, then everyone assumes they can ignore the staff with no consequences.
So, I really don't know what to do about spelling and grammar mistakes.
* editing is clearly harmful
** either the user gets outraged, or
** the user is encouraged to keep making mistakes and causing you loads of extra work
* warning is clearly harmful
** it escalates into bans, which
** leads people to think you are a tyrant
* ignoring is clearly harmful
** it's painful to read text-speak, and tends to be corrosive to the intellectual level of the entire forum
Given the above, I go with warning. I'll take the badge of tyrant if that's what it takes. But I really hate all three options =(
There's also evidence that introvertedness is directly linked to how painful it is to deal with spelling and grammar issues:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0149885Or for a more readable version:
http://www.today.com/health/do-you-poin ... you-t84206Speaking for myself at least, I am on the extreme end of being an introvert, so that likely explains a lot in my case. (I won't presume to place you on that scale, of course.)