Failing Enterprise Discussion Board Guidelines
Hello Failing Enterprise Community Members,
I'm always looking for ways to improve the usefulness of
Failing Enterprise and the quality of the discussions here on the
discussion board. After reading thousands of messages, I'm
ready to offer some advice on how to be a useful contributor on the
board:
1. This site and discussion board are about Enterprise and
their policies and procedures. I have regular two-way communications with an
in-house attorney at Enterprise's St. Louis headquarters and they
occasionally express concern when seeing messages that express some
particularly insulting personal criticism (discussing or speculating on a
female employee's sexual history, for example) linked with
individually-identifiable information about the employee.
I've got a beef with Enterprise, but plastering this sort of
information on our discussion board isn't really helping and
threatens to distract from our message. Therefore, please try
to follow this guideline:
If you want to talk about the job performance of an
individually-identified employee, or things related to their
employment at Enterprise, that's not a problem, but speculating on
private matters which are inappropriate to discuss in the workplace
distracts us from our goals here at Failing Enterprise, so please
avoid posting this sort of information, particularly when linked to
identifying information such as including more than a first name.
2. Do your homework, get your facts straight, think clearly
and then write clearly. Express an opinion and explain why.
This board has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than other
discussion boards, and it’s one of our best features.
3. If you disagree with another posting, state your
disagreement and explain why. Criticizing someone else’s
argument is encouraged. Criticizing the person themselves,
however, only encourages retaliatory insults, sidetracks useful
discussion, suppresses participation, and is usually a sign of lazy
thinking and a weak argument.
The best way to criticize a posting is to make a better posting.
4. Don't use fanciful alternate spellings for swear words,
or even the swear words themselves. Best to skip them
entirely, as they weaken your argument by implying lack of
confidence in the power of your ideas. If you have something
worthwhile to say, showing that you lack good manners never improves
your believability.
5. Register with the discussion board. Your username will
be reserved for your use only, and you’ll be able to send and
receive e-mail messages on the internal message system, revealing
only your username. This will allow you to earn a reputation,
even if you wish to remain anonymous. Also, you'll still have
the option to temporarily log out and post without your username
whenever you wish. Being a registered user also enables
additional features on the discussion board. Most posters
start off unregistered, then later register, and are glad they did.
6. Use paragraphs and sentences and do the best you can
with spelling and grammar. Sure, it takes a little more time,
but it greatly improves the readability of your message. Try
to ignore everyone else's spelling and grammar errors.
Spelling Nazis are unpopular on the board and generally earn a
backlash. Also, not everyone here learned English as their
first language. The Admin is learning another language and is
humbled by the experience; let's give each other a break on spelling
and grammar.
Remember that while you're writing the message only once, it's
going to be read by other people probably hundreds of times; don't
make them work too hard to understand what you're writing.
For native speakers of English, I've found these to be the most
common ways people get tripped up:
- your (second person possessive) vs. you're
(contraction for "you are")
- their (third person possessive) vs. they're
(contraction for "they are") vs. there (an
indicator of location)
- loser (opposite of winner) vs. looser
(opposite of tighter)
- advice (noun, wisdom shared) vs. advise (verb,
to share wisdom)
- site (a place, like a construction site or a web
site) vs. sight (something seen from a particular
viewpoint, like a sight to behold, or out of sight) vs. cite
(to quote an authority or example)
7. Give praise and encouragement when it's earned. We
want to nurture our community and give each other a break.
As always, your feedback is encouraged. How can we make this
better?
Admin
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