> There's a disturbingly common practice on other message forums to post message content in the subject line, append "(nt)", and leave the message body blank. That's a huge personal peeve of mine, for more reasons than one. It encourages shallow conversation, posts by people with nothing to say, and is frustrating to surfers. I've updated the Message Forum Policy page with this new rule, and I'll soon have the forum scripts trap occurrences of "(nt)" in the subject line.
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> Mikey, please note I'm not picking on you so much as nipping a potential problem in the bud. Your "(nt)" message was an answer to a question and was hardly "insubstantial conversation." . . .


Actually, now that the subject of postal peeves has been ventured, I'd like to take this opportunity to voice some trepidation that I have been experiencing. Up till now (for the last 5000 posts), I have kept my mouth firmly shut for fear of gathering feet. Sam observes that the practise of [nt]'ing posts leads to shallow discussion, an observation with which I definitely agree. However, there's yet another exercise that sometimes provokes quite superficial postings... That of vying to post the 8000th post, the 9000th post, etc. It is sometimes called Milepost Racing. Because of the kind of posts it creates, it's sometimes banned on moderated forums.

Let me hasten to add that not all the Post Racing on Rinkforum has been a bad thing; far from it. i.e. Mousie's recent series of posts regarding Diana, candy, soda and the bathmat has spawned a great deal of highly enjoyable, interactive reading. I would not take that pleasure away from her for anything in the world. It's only when a board starts sprouting pointless posts little more than "jjkdfgkj;hdfg", and scrolling so much that us old fogies have trouble keeping up, that I begin to get irked. Well yeah, there has been a couple cases of that type of abuse already (Again, not you, dear Mousie). So if we could keep away from that kind of ickiness in general, that would be wonderful. Just trying to nip a possible evil forum future in the bud, really. :-)

Of course, with human nature being as it is, I expect y'all will want to scramble for post 10,000... a significant number under our decimal system. No, no, no -- you're just not thinking big enough! Me, I like to look at it from the Yahwehvian perspective, so I'm not going to lose sleep over a few paltry digits until the total number of Rinkforum posts reaches 144,000. At that time, like, you know, you better watch out.

Wolfspirit