I'm gonna go sit my newbie ass in Beverly's corner. And then giggle like a 12-year-old at any and all lube references.

Though Holli and Vortex are right behind you.

Ahem. Standing right here.

They can be my minions.

I see them more as backup singers.

You can be a minion too.

You can be a minion too.

Thank you.

I was going to post that everyone was new once but people beat me to it.

And yes I think there needs to be a better way to deal with new people who are trying to figure things out.

One thing I know that happened with Beej is she stepped on the soapbox a few times and this board is filled with intelligent people and people who have a very knee jerk reaction to anything that seems like they are being told what to do/lectured at.

Except, new people don't necessarily have a way of knowing that. Yes, it would be great if new people lurked and figured out the way the board worked. But that doesn't always happen and even if it did new people aren't going to know what are hot buttons for some people.

Heck, I'm not even sure what everyone's hot buttons are and I've been here for good amount of time.

Clarification, PMM, comes in that very same post.

Or, rather, there is what the reader perceives, and what the writer intended. And, because we can't hear tone, or see facial expression or body language, the reactions we have to posts are more a function of what we think the poster means than what the poster means. (Now, obviously, there are cases where a poster is quite blatent about what they intended, but that is perhaps the exception.)

This is why, instead of assuming that the 'tone' we've detected is what was intended, I think it's best to err on the side of patience, and perhaps ask for clarification of meaning.

What you get from a post has more to do with you - your perceptions, your experience of the poster, your issues - than with the words in the box.

Still, I don't see it. There's been in influx of newbies, sure. I don't see mistreatment of them, some have made themselves quite at home.

Feeling a little like Sodapop in The Outsiders, here. I see impatience more than mistreatment (and I'm guilty of that too). At the same time I wouldn't think of asking Allyson (I'm just using you as an example here, same goes for anyone else) to change how she posts. It may rankle some, but anything else wouldn't be true to her.

Maybe our in-between solution is to add the guac metaphor to the cautionary 'fitting in is your own job' stuff in ettiquitte. It might inspire a little added caution.

Ahem. Standing right here.

So sorry. I bow to your musty decrepitude wise seniority.

Thanks, Elena.

I'm fighting off an ook, so I'm very tired this morning. Okay, afternoon, techincally.

What you get from a post has more to do with you - your perceptions, your experience of the poster, your issues - than with the words in the box.

But all those things are formed by the words in the box, except the issues, and as I said, if more than one person is having tone issues, then the words in the box probably have a lot more to do with it than the issues of an individual poster.