Are Chief Delphi users thin-skinned?

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by thegathering

From my experiences, I have noticed that members tend to use the reputation system instead of the personal messaging system when it comes to differentiating opinions.

There will always be times in life when you read or see something that will cause our emotions - whether for good or for bad - to temporarily "over-ride" our logical thinking. When you see a thread entitled "help!!!!!!!!!!!!! my controller wont download default code!!!!11! plz help!", don't automatically and irrationally bomb them with negative rep just because they are new to the forum. Instead, send them a PM or neutral rep explaining what they posted wrong. But do so in a polite and business-like manner. Don't flame them.

In the 18 months I've been here, I think I've only given negative rep at most three times.

Originally Posted by thegathering

There will always be disagreements and even more so in a forum that has a high population of engineers and others that are not willing to stand down from their beliefs and accept new ideas. However, I don't believe that the negative rep system should be used to force ideas or retaliate against other people who may or may not have a valid point in their ideas.

Disagreements != Negative Rep

If you present your ideas in a clear, meaningful, and mature manner, there is never a reason that you should receive negative rep. If someone goes out and posts that "Pi is equal to exactly three!", they are not automatically wrong. They could be limited to a single significant digit in their calculation, in which case this statement would hold true. So even something that looks wrong at first glance may hold deeper truth.

When I first signed up, I never thought that I would become one of the members with eleven green boxes of positive rep. All I knew was that I never wanted to have negative rep. So all I did, and still do today, is double read every post I make. I usually take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to compose a single post for ChiefDelphi. (This one took about 40 minutes.) I will usually write it out, reread through it, change stuff around, clarify this, take out that, and run the Spell Check until all I'm left with is a great post.

A lot of people forget this when posting, but your posts here on ChiefDelphi will more or less be here forever. Do you really want that post you just be made to be on the Internet forever? Once something makes it onto the Internet, its usually there in some way, shape, or form forever, even if the original post is deleted. Search engine caches, the Internet Archive, and the memories of the people who read it prior to being deleted are all traces of your original post. Post wisely.