[bad choices] Internet Etiquette

[thatneedslube]

I make fun of badfic here a lot, FG fans, and don't worry, there's a delicious post coming up soon, but there are other things that make me de-friend journals, skip over fic, and generally run in the opposite direction to get away from someone on Livejournal or Dreamwidth. You know what I'm talking about. Those people who don't seem to understand the basics of interacting online, or that they extend to formatting.


Cut tags!
They're super easy!

If you don't use a cut tag for

• fic


• episode reactions


• anything longer than 300 words

...I will de-friend you and so will everyone else. It's practically guaranteed.

Cut tags are easy. Here's the Livejournal how-to entry which works on dreamwidth, too, so it's not even like you need to learn separate code.

While we're on the topic of cut tags,
Fake cuts!
( This is a fake cut! It looks like a cut! )
This is just a link, don't call it a fake cut!
http://www.google.com This is me just pasting a URL in! Don't do this. Learn how to make a link, or use the buttons in rich text mode that will do it for you.

Fic summary posts
If you want anyone to read your fic summary post and click through to your story, don't do any of the following things:

• Change the font size


• Fail to use bold to indicate title/rating/warnings/summary


• Not have a summary


• Have a summary post longer than your story

Also people who use words like "angstiness", "sexing", "boy sex", "boy kissing", or anything about a "muse" or "lyrics" etc? I automatically assume you are 12 and skip onwards, especially because juvenile language like that in your summary post doesn't exactly make me assume your story is going to be any good.

Having long conversations in the comment thread of a comment fic
Let's say you're posting a story on one of the kink memes. You know what's awesome? Comments, and fic.

You know what's not awesome? Two parts of a story in one night and 60 messages of the author and one of the commenters discussing something. Take that shit to someone's journal. Very few people are tracking a comment fic to read you and someone else discuss what underwear you should wear this Thursday - they're there for fic. If Livejournal had an option in the track dialogue that let me somehow filter out everything except fic I would use it every five seconds.

Large graphics outside a cut
Inevitably these suddenly make a giant scrollbar appear across the bottom of my screen and screw up the formatting of everything else on the page. Keep it under a cut.

Serif, italic font as your default
...especially if it's in say, sky blue against a black background. I already have to use the Readability bookmarklet on half the internet, but you always kind of hope the people you talk to on your friends list are smarter than that.

Sadly, some of them are apparently not.

Automatic twitter feeds outside a cut
If I wanted to follow you on twitter, I would. Don't make me see it outside a cut tag.

Voice posts
I don't want to know what you sound like, and also I'm not listening to your voice post because a voice post is the LJ equivalent of voice mail: no one wants to listen to it.

Tagging
If you post fic, art, or whatever, tag it. Tag it by fandom, tag it by pairing, I don't care just tag it. Do you know how frustrating it is to find part one of something on your journal and then there's no tag, no sticky post, no nothing?

That's the point where I assume you don't want me to read your story. And that's fine. I'll read something else instead and just never come back.

Adding the text "Link found in comments!!!" to _finders posts
If you have the time to edit the entry with that text you have the time to add a link to the story.


With internet etiquette my rule of thumb is if someone else posted this, would I want to read it? If the answer is no, then I erase everything.

Don't be a dick: make it easy on people to read and find your stuff.

PS: Please use lube in your story. Please. No lube = deal breaker.

Tell us your Livejournal/Dreamwidth pet peeves! There are so many, and I know we've missed load of them.

Comments

[tygermama]

Thank you for all of this, I've made some of these mistakes when I was new to livejournal and now I know better and it makes me grind my teeth when others do these things.

other stuff that bugs me:

- changing your default font to comic sans or anything else unreadable.

- putting "Please read and review" or anything else begging for comments or saying that if people don't comment, you won't write anymore. If you love your story and are having fun, you'll write it regardless of feedback.

[manaie]

god. crossposting to any more than 2 comms that have almost exactly the same membership base will piss me off every time.

[christycorr]

Cross-posting from twitter period annoys me—I have everyone on notifs, and ugh, I already follow you on Twitter, whyyy must I get a daily alert from LJ/DW as well? D:

[mackiedockie]

I find myself in agreement--nicely formatted cuts and links are of the awesome. However, I recently ran into a slight issue with the 'link found in comments' -- a post I had made to a moderated community went through, but the link back to my story was peculiarly modified (the name of the community was pasted in front of the a href html, leading it astray), and it resulted in a 404 page. No amount of editing would clean up the link, probably because of the moderation block. Eventually, I had to post the corrected link in the comments, which were not affected by the moderated strictures.

[michelel72]

I see that kind of link screwup if the part in the "a href" does not start with the full proper "http://" string. Without that, the browser assumes the quoted link is a subpage of the current page. Fun times.

[coneyislandbaby]

I disagree on the just pasting a link. I prefer that to messed-up html which always happens to me.

[dossier]

"That's the point where I assume you don't want me to read your story. And that's fine. I'll read something else instead and just never come back."

AMEN. I'll sometimes ask politely if the summary was intriguing, but having to track down all entries on a tag, or from a masterpost will often cause me to tag as skimmed, neverreadagain, or some other fail!tag, and move onto something else. links from one post to the next in a story is not that difficult.

[waketosleep]

Man, if you can't be happy with clicking a series tag or something and having all the parts automagically appear on the page for you, and you need me to hold your hand by taking extra (boring, annoying) minutes from my day to go find the last post, get the link to the new post, and edit the old post with a link that says 'Next' or 'Part n' or whatever, through the thousand steps and windows it takes on the lj blog platform, then I don't care if I'm inconveniencing you. Go to AO3 and hope it's over there.

That's MY two cents.

I agree with the main post, however. Some kind of linkage between story parts/easy-to-find masterpost/use of the fairly simple entry tagging system is appreciated by me. Don't post shit and leave it adrift and linkless in an internet void, and don't post it directly onto some big-ass comm with a tagging system that doesn't allow me to track down the other fifty parts of your story easily, either. You have a journal, authors who do this! Please use it.