The Double-posting Dilemma
When I prepared the final draft of the October 2010 revision of the Wesnoth.org Forums Posting Guidelines, I deliberately skipped clarifying a specific point regarding posting rate conducts, more specifically, point 1f, in order to see what the community would make out of it.
That’s not to say I didn’t alter it in any way whatsoever since the previous revision, which was basically a left-over of Turuk’s administration:
Before:
Think and Read.
Read the entire thread before you post. And when you post, explain your reasons. Nonsense may be deleted without warning, especially in a working topic. Posting the same thing after it has been deleted will get you a warning. Doing it again will get you a ban.
No Spamming.
Post a single idea/question/comment in only one forum. Do not double post, edit your previous post if you have something new to add but no one has posted yet.
After:
No spamming — think and read
Post a single idea/question/comment in only one forum. Do not double post, and instead edit your previous post if you have something new to add and no one has posted yet. Technical support requests may be bumped after a while in case they have been forgotten and sink past the first forum view page. Read the entire thread before replying to it. Nonsense may be deleted without warning, especially in a working topic.
I introduced the support requests bit with the intention of giving users in the support forums (Technical Support, Release Announcements, Compiling & Installation; WML Workshop, Coder’s Corner, Lua Labs, Scenario & Campaign Development) special protection as bumping topics in there is usually a legitimate and reasonable course of action. But in reality, there are other cases where bumping by means of double-posting should be allowed. Those are not described or explained in the Guidelines because I felt that elaborating on a specific point would derail the whole post.
One of those cases applies to campaign development topics, where the OP may post the announcement for a new version of the campaign and only a few hours later find himself or herself in need of another announcement because of a quick update fixing some important bug.
Another case, more technical than practical, is the maximum number of attachments per post, which exists to discourage and limit senseless spamming of unwanted content by automated and non-automated agents, and encourage use of compressed containers like tarballs, zip files and rar archives to keep our overall disk usage relatively low. Users exceeding the attachment limit will need to continue posting their content in consecutive posts.
Generally speaking, users reporting double/multiple posting according to section 5 of the Guidelines have enough common sense to understandhat sometimes exceptions need to be granted and that this is one of the reasons we don’t call them the “Forum Rules”. Rent-a-modders occasionally lack this common sense, however, and they make their intentions evident through this mechanism. I imagine one can never be too anvilicious while reminding them what this entails.