Basic etiquette

Stockopedia’s community provides investors with a space to share and debate their investment thinking in relation to stocks, sectors and investment themes. With that in mind, we have established some basic "etiquette guidelines" for everyone that posts on the site.

We ask all members using the community to:

1. Welcome participation - the Stockopedia community is a place where any investor should feel welcome to post questions, offer answers and build their own expertise with the help of the community. Newcomers who feel shy can get used to posting in the Introductions forum where old hands will always be on hand to help. Without active commenting, liking and reading this community wouldn’t grow so please get involved and don’t discourage others.
2. Be civilised - Stockopedia is a civilised place for public discourse so please act as respectfully to others as you would in public. Good manners and simple courtesy are expected and however much you may disagree with what is written, there's no need to be offensive when posting. It's important to remember that there is a huge amount of diversity amongst our audience and to be respectful to all readers. We're all here to help the community, to share knowledge and different ideas, so please help to create the best investor site possible. Above all, be nice.
3. Improve the debate - Whenever posting, please consider how your post helps or adds to the prevailing discussion. If you aren’t sure, it’s sometimes better to keep thinking through your response before posting. Off-topic replies or idle banter are better posted on either different threads, appropriate social hangouts or as private group messages. Keep the signal to noise ratio high.
4. Respect contrary opinion - This is an an especially important point for stock market discussions where investors can have highly biased points of view when they are long a stock. Behavioural science shows that investors seek out information and individuals that confirm their view while shunning contrary opinion. Confirmation bias can be very expensive so let’s welcome contrary viewpoints and not hound them away by down voting or ganging up. It’s okay to disagree.
5. Stay on topic - This is a space to discuss investment topics and it should be a comfortable place for everyone to contribute. Contrary viewpoints are great, but let's make sure we steer away from sensitive, polarising, non-investment-related topics. Keep it relevant.
6. Flag problems, don’t add to them - Whenever you see a post that breaks either the site etiquette or posting rules, please DO NOT reply. Just report the post by clicking the Flag icon. If a post gets lots of flags it will either be removed automatically or by a moderator. Posting replies to inflammatory posts will waste everyone’s time, create an off-topic discussion and create a negative vibe. Don’t feed the trolls.
7. Keep things tidy - If you can put some effort into your posting then we’ll have less tidying to do and we can spend more time developing new features. So here’s a quick list of dos and don’ts: Please try to categorise new threads with relevant tags; Please don’t post off-topic, create a new thread instead and invite a response; Please don’t post unnecessary images; Please try and post with good grammar and sentence structure; Please don’t cross post on multiple threads; Please also check out our style rules below.

Beyond the general etiquette principles, there are a few key points of writing style which should we ask all members to adhere to:

1. Use descriptive titles - Please create a title for your post that reflects the content and is descriptive. A good title will increase the readership of your content as it will get more clicks when seen in a list view, and it is more likely to be searched for and found on the wider web.
2. Add structure to longer posts - people tend to scan text on websites rather than read sequentially like they do when reading a novel. Bearing that in mind it really helps if longer posts include sub-headings, lists, tables, images and horizontal breaks to make the text easier to read. Use the tools available in the editor.
3. Write clear english - This community is here to communicate, so please don’t make your posts hard to understand. Check spellings (that’s what spell checkers are for), use full stops, shorten your sentence lengths (rambling paragraphs can be hard to understand).
4. DON’T SHOUT - posting in capitals is strictly forbidden in thread or article titles. There’s no need to shout - if you need to emphasise please use bold text or italics… that’s what they are there for. And isn’t one question mark or exclamation mark enough ???!!!?!!