Chat and Text Message Etiquette

We know, posting rules of etiquette on the Internet does no good. It is, after all, one big anarchy, and most of you will go off and do whatever you very well please, and thumb your nose at the nannies who don't like it. But, well, we have this expression we call the "social web", and to be social you have to have friends. Now, that turns the light on, doesn't it? Follow these rules, and there'll be no worries.

Don't Private Message By Surprise Don't just pop off and send a private message to someone in a group chat. This makes a new window or tab pop open on their desk, and they tend to get cranky about it. Ask in the public chat first. Other chat/ message mediums post the text in the same window, but only you and your correspondent can see it. This is slightly more acceptable, but it's still seen as unnecessary unless you were invited to.

Don't Bludger That is, don't barge into a public chat and demand everybody drop everything to help you with every brainless question you have. Nothing will get you flamed faster. If you can't be bothered to search Google for an answer, don't expect others to bother doing anything but put you on 'ignore'.

Don't Troll For A Date Even in dating/ meet-up channels. This goes for the blokes. This goes three times for the blokes. It doesn't matter how much we say it, though, because the kind of blokes who need to hear it never listen. Check around first, at least. If you see other people asking to meet up, like in a single's channel, then you can crack onto someone once. We mean once.

Don't Whinge About The Service Twitter's down again. Yes, we know. It sucks when it's down. Yes, we agree. Why won't they get it fixed? Bloody good question! But could you waste some more of our time while you're at it?

Give Someone Else a Turn Even though we're all fascinated by every detail of your life and every idle thought on your mind, perhaps the rest of us have something worthwhile to bash your ear with.

"What Are You Doing?" Is Not A Greeting We knew a bloke who did this at every message. We learned to respond back after awhile, "Answering your message." Then he learned to ask "Before that?" And we'd say "Hitting send." And so forth. Either he finally got the message or we ditched him, we can't recall which.

You Only Have One Mother Everybody else doesn't care quite as much. Reporting every minute body function is likely to provoke somebody to give you a gobful back.

Keep It Brief There's a reason that Twitter and other text message protocols limit the character count. It's not technology. It's to make these long-winded people cut it short and get to the point.

Don't Count On Other's Memory We can't possibly keep track of the day-by-day score in your latest fight with your girlfriend or your hunt for the perfect Feral. We have 180 friends on our list all clamoring for attention. We barely recognize you when you do get through.

Don't Preach Language We write for a living over here, you know. We know every bloody rule of English and every sub-rule of grammar and exception to spelling and tiny little punctuation mark and where it goes. We've successfully conjugated a verb, applied a gerund, modified a prepositional phrase, identified the proper group noun and deployed a semicolon all in the same glorious sentence. But you know what we're going to do when we chat? Wer goin 2 tak lik ths! M4B3 3Vn 1N 13375P34K! D00D! Cuz the txt iz so shrt. See, you can still understand it. Quit whinging about proper English. Save it for when there's room to read proper English.

Filed Under: The Internetz