Forum Rules

After some of the site’s recent Forum posting and commenting activity, I’d like to share the following rules for posting and commenting.

Rules for posting to the Forum: 

• Must illustrate something financial whether it be a lesson, an observation, or a story. The financial component can be obvious, a hidden nugget within a well written story, or something in between. The majority of posts achieve this.
• No polls to readers. Polls to the readers will come from me or Bogdan. If there is an issue that could benefit from a reader poll, send a direct email with your request and your reason for the request.
• No direct complaints about other commenters or writers, the site itself, or its administration. Again, a send direct email explaining the issue you feel needs to be addressed.
• No obvious political biases, rants or other incendiary political sentiments.

If any of the above are not met, your post will not be approved and will not appear on the site.

Rules for commenting:

• Avoid nastiness. Your overall point may be valid, but if other readers and commenters are in wide consensus your tone is unnecessarily harsh, cruel, or personally hurtful, your comments will be deleted and you risk being banned from posting on the site.  Jonathan had no problem banning folks from the site.  Neither will I.
• Avoid politics. Enough said.
• Avoid dissing the site, any of its participants, or its administration. If you don’t like the site or what it has to offer, don’t visit it. Your absence will not be missed.

In an earlier post when the Forum was first introduced, Jonathan shared the following writing suggestions for participants from which I now borrow:

• Don’t refer to stocks and funds by their ticker symbols or, at a minimum, not on first reference. It’s a struggle to recall what many of the ticker symbols refer to.
• The same holds true for referring to phrases by their initials. Common initialisms like CEO and MBA are fine. But readers may skip over your post if it includes initialisms such as POA (power of attorney), OMY (one more year) or YMMV (your mileage may vary).
• Give it a listen. Check every piece you write.  Jonathan always had his laptop read it back. It doesn’t take long, and it’s a great way to spot spelling mistakes and missed words, though it won’t help you if you’ve confused “your” with “you’re,” or you’re mixing up “their,” “there” and “they’re.”   (I still have yet to develop that habit.)
• Give HumbleDollar’s style guide a read. Forum posts are more casual than the articles that the site runs, so I don’t expect the former to follow every one of the style guide’s rules. But perusing those rules may help you avoid some of the more obvious writing pitfalls.

HumbleDollar is a renowned repository for all things personal finance.  Let’s keep it that way.