by Matt Bird

Created on: August 07, 2009

The Internet is the ultimate in freedom, both for good and for ill. You can act however you like and, aside from the occasional forum banning and complaints from other users, you won't really get in trouble. There are laws, yes, but the sheer number of online infractions each day makes it impossible to police the Internet.

Consequently users must police themselves, and doing so requires some knowledge of common online etiquette. In order to improve the online lives of everyone around you, please take some of the following tips about your behavior into account.

- Keep your surroundings in mind when saying something. It's OK to swear online, but don't do it in chat rooms filled with kids or young adults. Moderate your tone and content just as you would in real life.

- Try to speak in full sentences. My request that everybody try to use proper grammar will never work, so I can at least ask that everybody try to fit everything they have to say into a single sentence rather than a dozen disparate snippets.

- Don't make EVERYTHING into an acronym. Not everybody understands them. Take the extra second or two to type a word out in full rather than compressing absolutely everything you have to say.

- Be polite. Would you want somebody wandering up to you on the street and addressing you by some racist term? Not likely. Reserve your cruel phrasings for your own noggin, and try not to let them out into the world.

- For the men: when addressing a female, don't start with 'asl?' or 'wanna cyber?' or anything like that. Yes, you may be lonely, but that doesn't mean you can't be courteous.

- If arguing with someone online, don't just start calling them names and swear every second word. That doesn't prove anything beyond your own lack of creativity. If you're really concerned with pointing out the flaws of another person's argument, use logic. name-calling is juvenile and shows you have nothing to back up your point.

- When sending e-mails, start with a proper salutation and end with thanks and so forth, the same as you would a normal letter. I've seen lots of e-mails that demand instant gratification with no promise of gratitude for your time. I hate those e-mails, and seldom respond.

- Don't spam. Nobody cares about that funny picture of the dog, or at least not a thousand times over.

- And, for those of you who just can't help but bend the rules, don't. You're just making the lives of the moderators and administrators of all those little web forums miserable.

Despite what you may think the Internet requires a certain level of decorum. Break the rules and you'll suffer the consequences. Nobody will talk to you, and you'll be just as isolated - if not moreso - than you were in the beginning. In short, don't be a jerk.

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