First - Thank you for being here and willingness to help educate others. Your input IS valuable and appreciated.
Second:


We have had a hard time getting new people to follow forum rules. It wastes everyones' time when we ignore the problem b/c we have to keep going back over and over to the same post to ask for more information. So we are posting some guidelines for our members to follow in answering questions - and its painless!
Proposed solution:
Forum posting guidelines exist to save us time/effort by maximizing online time and enabling more people to be helped.


Simple Procedure for enforcing guidelines on an improper post:
1. Don’t answer what they are asking about, but
2. Kindly remind them we require the guidelines being followed so we get enough information to help them,.
(Yeah - OK - fancy talk for “not until you say please!” But is it really bad expecting a one time effort from them to find out what we need to give an answer the first time so we don't have to keep going back over and over to keep asking for more info?)
Since you likely already know/use the rules, when reading a post its a no brainer if the post is proper. If the post is not proper, give a reminder to follow the rules plus a link where to find them.
But won’t me reminding them take even more of my time?
Nope! We have a plan for that!
Following is a one time setup to make a friendly reminder simple and even faster than typing a normal answer:
One time setup:
1. Open Notepad (or textedit on a Mac)
2. Make a new file and call it “Friendly_Reminder”
3. Copy/paste the following lines between the quotes into your file - you can leave out the quotes:
“
Sorry, but your post needs some work before we have enough information to help you!
Please use this link and then make corrections (you can make them below) before posting anything else to the forum:
“
4. Save the note as “Friendly_Reminder” on your computer in a convenient place (mine is on my desktop since I use it almost every day!).
Usage:
1. Always open the “Friendly_Reminder” file before going to the forum.
2. Highlight and copy all the contents - this makes the message to paste where needed (BTW - using keyboard shortcuts REALLY makes this fast: ctrl+C for copy and CTRL-V for paste).
3. When you see an improper post (title, not the right pictures, etc.), paste the contents of your Friendly_Reminder file into the reply box and hit submit. This is even faster than finding a “we need pictures” emoji!
If you see some other member has already posted a friendly reminder...so what! Overload the post! Get serious with these people and show them we mean business! Make them see so many reminders they have nightmares about it!
…well…no...seriously...you could just skip to the next one you want to see instead. Just do NOT type an answer to their question - which takes longer than just hitting ctrl-v to paste the friendly reminder anyway!
Optional Graphic:
IF you so desire to include it with your reminders, I have included a graphic below. Copy/paste this into your Friendly_Reminder file, but know the file is simply being used like a container to store the graphic where you will know it can be found. The graphic, like every other picture you upload, will have to be posted through normal picture posting procedures.
(right click and use "save as" on that graphic if you want to save it to your machine)