Think Before You Post

By Sanya Weathers

I always feel a little embarrassed about posting these “obvious truth” blog entries. As a corollary, I’m always a little surprised to learn that people will give me money in exchange for common sense. And yet… if you follow MMO gossip, there has been a real rash of problems in the genre lately, and they’re all caused by people not thinking before they run their mouths.

I understand it. Heck, I DO it. Here are some things I’ve taught myself to do over the years to keep from getting into even more trouble than usual. There are two categories: Speed Bumps, and Mentality.

Speed Bumps

–    Separate documents for composition. If you’re the excitable type, don’t compose your text (blog, Facebook, Twitter, forums, IRC, etc) in the provided interface. Use Notepad. (Don’t use Word – the formatting junk Word does to text won’t copy well into other programs.) The act of cutting and pasting, and then proofreading and formatting, will slow you down enough to prevent the most egregious errors in judgment.

–    Timer. Go through your board games. You don’t play them anymore, anyway. Steal the one minute timer out from one of them. When you finish writing a post, flip it over. Do not hit submit until the sand is finished pouring. We’re making games, not crewing a medevac helicopter. There is nothing, absolutely nothing we will ever encounter than cannot wait one minute.

–    Angry timer. If you’re angry, you need to literally get up and leave your desk. Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em. Make a cup of coffee. Walk around the entire office once. Whatever. But stay gone a minimum of five minutes. No, sitting there at your desk surfing other websites won’t do the trick. You’ve got to break the plane.

–    Read it out loud. Do it yourself if you must, but preferably you should use a text-to-speech program to get yourself entirely out of the equation. Actually hearing the words will prevent you from using ill-advised ones.

Mentality

–    You’re not in charge of other people’s feelings. My old friend Jon Hanna, one of the first CMs… well, ever, tells newcomers “you don’t get to decide what is and what is not a big deal.” Your community will decide what they think is a big deal. Professional CMs can predict what will be a major issue, but that’s not the same thing as deciding. If the community gets fired up over something you didn’t predict, don’t take it personally. Treat it like a case study… after you apologize and explain.

–    All text is equal. It’s so tempting to think of website text as Serious Business, blogs and Facebook as personal soapboxes, and Twitter as a transient, insubstantial, disposable medium. Don’t think that way. Every word on the internet is forever, no matter how it got there. The sidewalk is not less wet whether the source of the moisture was a thunderstorm, melting ice, or a dog.

–    Be lazy efficient. An efficient person completes each task with minimal therbligs. Which takes less effort and fewer motions – reading a problematic post out loud before hitting submit, or spending the next three days after you post apologizing, blogging, explaining, and listening to armchair quarterbacks on the internet dispensing obvious truth?