Forum culture is not the same as social media culture. If you’re younger than the days when forums were the most popular space to gather, you might not be aware of how people expect you to act. Here’s some tips!

Double-posting is discouraged. This means that you shouldn’t make another post directly after yourself – if you’ve realise you’ve missed out some thoughts, please edit them into the post instead. At the request of users, we make an exception here for situations like posing a question when starting a thread, then giving your response separately.

Reputation should only be for really good posts. This is hugely different from social media where likes tend to be used pretty liberally, even just to acknowledge that you’ve read something. On forums, reputation should be treated as an award for putting extra thought or effort into a post, or bringing novel and interesting ideas to the table.

Grammar standards tend to be higher on forums. Many have explicit rules enforcing capitalization, punctuation, sparse use of emoji/emoticons and even disallowing swearing. On the Alt+H forum, we don't particularly mind as long as your posts are thoughtful and easy for others to read.

Necro-ing threads: this refers to responding to a thread when it hasn’t been active in a long time, thereby ‘resurrecting’ it. How long after it’s ok to do this varies a lot by forum, and certain places will lock a thread after it hasn’t had any activity in, say, a month. Here, we’re pretty happy for you to revive any old thread that catches your interest.

Signatures are blocks of content that go on the end of all of your posts. They’re a lot of fun, but please don’t make them too obnoxious - don’t make them overly long or add flashy gifs, too many garish colors, too large a font, stuff like that. Mods have the ability to edit or remove your signature if it’s a nuisance to others. And if you hate the idea of signatures in general, you can hide them site-wide in your preferences.