Hello, I’m new here and I grew up in the land of tumblr not dedicated forum sites so I’m not too familiar with the etiquette of a traditional forum vs the hellsite (affectionate) I’m use to, also unsure if this is the right place to ask but here goes.
What’s the etiquette for making much longer responses within topics, I’m used to thinking about adding a Break in the text that allows people to ‘read more’ if they want to. But I’m not sure this has a feature like that or whether that’s applied automatically. Just thinking as responses are laid out linearly in a scroll, if I’m posting something long and it’s not collapsable that may be considered poor form.
Is it best to avoid making long posts in general under a topic, to link to an external site for longer posts, make it a topic it’s own, or is is chill to post things that are much longer? I’d hate to annoy anyone with having to scroll past a reply that’s long if they’re not interested but similarly I don’t want to limit myself to a lack of nuance or enthused analysis to fit a self imposed character limit.
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You can make plenty of long posts here! One of the beauties of a forum is that people aren’t time limited in reading or replying, so if something’s longer than I want to read, I can always bookmark it and come back to it later. Posts here can have very differing lengths.
One thing you can use if you feel your post might be too long to read comfortably is the “hide details” option. You can find that under the settings when you make a post and it looks like this:
Summary
Your post can go here
It’s also really helpful if what your posting has a lot of spoilers, as you do otherwise have to spoiler-blur each paragraph on its own.
Making a post its own topic is most useful if it’s something where you want to encourage discussion on the things you’re bringing up, and those are markedly different to, say, the discussion on the episode that brought them on. But really don’t worry about topics or staying on topic too much because our conversations regularly go off topic as hell. And the mods can always split or merge or move threads.
All of that is my point of view at least. Probably also helpful to just read a bit in whatever things seem interesting to you, that way you’ll get a feeling for the place fast. And don’t be afraid to revive old threads! It’s always fun if there’s a new discussion being started.
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Yeah, walls of text are normal here, maybe not super common, but definitely normal.
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Thank you that’s incredibly helpful!
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I would probably say that there is no real etiquette and you are free to write how long replies that you want. The only thing with really long replays is that they gets harder to respond to and that makes it harder to have a discussion.
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A few things I’ll mention:
If you’re thinking of making something its own topic, it’s a good idea to doublecheck if there’s already a topic, even if no ones posted in it for a long time. While there are places that don’t like you bumping old posts, that’s not us. We’re good with necroposting.
If it’s about a particular episode or audio or book or such, it’s especially worth a check as it’s possible we might’ve already posted a thread for it. We’re gradually posting TV Club threads from all of classic and new who, for example, so all of 1 & 9’s episodes have threads.
And if you want to post something that’s a guide rather then a discussion, you might talk to shauny. There are some guides in the main tardis guide page under the Guides button, and those were generally by members as well. (Though not me, so I don’t know all the details.)
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