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| Tip #1: Use a font people can read | Tip #6: Don't take it personally |
| Tip #2: Use emphasis sparingly | Tip #7: Someone's absence  your victory |
| Tip #3: Don't ask why the room topic isn't being discussed | Tip #8: Tone is not always obvious |
| Tip #4: Don't post novels | Tip #9: Remember you're talking to a real person |
| Tip #5: Stay far, far away from Godwin's Law | Some acronyms generally used in chat |
| Don't use all capitals (shouting), all underlining, yellow or other flourescent or hard-to-read colors, or bright neon green (aka "fundie green"). Bolding your text helps it show up better, since most people already used bolded text and unbolded text seems faint, in comparison. If you would like to use blended colors, also called "fades", for your text, you need to download a software program called Cheetachat. Cheetachat has many customizable settings including the little pictures ("avatars") that appear by the chatters' names. It's free and well worth a look-see. |
| Reading text with lots of emphasis, such as frequent caps, is equivalent to listing to a speaker who gets in your face every other word. Multiple question marks and exclamation points can make you look excitable and immature. Stay calm, pleasant, and have a sense of humor. It'll floor them. Really. |
| It isn't that no one is discussing the room topic, it's just that no one happened to be
discussing it upon your entrance. Yahoo! chat has been around for several years and many
regs have been chatting in their respective rooms for just as long. Naturally, our
conversation encompasses many things in addition to the room topic, since we know each other beyond
our views on the room topic. The conversation turns back around to the room topic sooner or
later. Instead of asking why no one is talking about it just now, try asking questions or
stating a position to bring the topic back around again. Exception: in the Abortion Debate rooms, "Coffee Chat" occurs between approximately 5:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. eastern time (U.S.) which means little to no discussion of abortion takes place. This evolved because regs come to meet their friends in the mornings and few feel like debating abortion when they've just woken up. You can bring up the topic if you like, but expect to hear the regs voice objections and expect little, if any, participation from them. |
| Sometimes posts four to five lines or longer are necessary to make a point, but bear in mind that they may go unread. If you must make a post that long, apologize for its length in your next post to soften the blow. |
| Godwin's Law: the longer an internet discussion continues, the greater the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler or the Holocaust. Net tradition is that once this occurs, that debate is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis/Hitler/Holocaust has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. It doesn't even need to be mentioned that such a reference to Nazi Germany is extremely disrespectful to those whom it affected, and their descendants, does it? You knew that. |
your victory.| When someone doesn't answer you immediately, or if they leave the chat room, even abruptly, their computer could have crashed, their coffee spilled, their ISP hiccupped, their screen frozen, their kids called them, the dog peed on the carpet, the boss came by... you get the picture. While it would be nice to have someone's interminable and undivided attention when chatting, the reality of internet chat (and life) is that that just isn't so. That doesn't mean they didn't want to and/or couldn't debate you. If you assume things that happen must naturally happen in relation to you, get over it. |
| No one can see your body language nor hear your inflections in a chat room. A sense of humor, use of irony, and sarcasm may be readily apparent to some while not to others. That's something to remember as you are trying to understand and be understood. |
| Don't forget there are living,
breathing human beings on the other end of the words on your screen. |
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