Bitcoin Forum

Reading is one of the most essential things in human culture. People read many types of things, from online sources (news, social media groups, message platforms), from paper things (textbooks, newspaper), and more. Today, I would like to raise to discussion, that is also a Warning for posters, especially newbies.

What we should do first in the forum? Reading, Writing, or Discussing?
No matter what your opnion is, the answer for all of us is available there:
Newbies - Read before posting (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1689727.0) (by Lauda)

Besides things presented in the Lauda's topic,I want to ask you: What we should read?
[1] Reading the OP's title;
[2] Reading the OP's contents;
[3] Reading previous flow of discussions;
[4] Reading the day of last post.

Let's look deeper in to each of these three Reading steps.
[1] Reading the OP's title
Topic title is the one that help readers to fastly have first impression and main ideas of one topic. It is only true with topics that have good title. Theymos has a guide on how to make good topic titles here:
Topic title style guide (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102944.0)
You should read the topic titles first, before moving to OP contents and read  more. If the topic tiltes are boring, you can skip those topics. However, I don't generalize that boring topic titles are always equal to boring topics. Maybe, sometimes writers don't have good skills to choose good titles for their topics. So, if you actually have time to read, you should move to read OP's contents, even with boring topic titles.

[2] Reading the OP's contents
The topic titles give your first impressions, but the most important thing of topics are OP's contents. Good topics mostly have well-organized contents. They usually writen down with main points, from which details, minor points will be spred out to express what authors want to talk about. Therefore, you have to read the OP's contents before start to think of writing down your posts and join discussions.

[3] Reading previous flow of discussions
After reading the first two (Topic title, and OP), you should spend your time to find out which things have been discussed till the day you find that topic. Which flow of dicussions and ideas raised and answered in previous posts. This step is only unnecessary when you are the first people find and read topic, and there is no or less replies after OP before you read it.
You can read OP, or someone do a little better by readind the OP, and last post, or OP + first previous posts after OP + last posts, then typing your reply with intention to help authors or to discuss, but it will become non-sense and off-context reply if topic's authors actually find what they asked for with replies for others, before yours.
Tips:
- Reading the OP;
- Scanning to find merited posts, and read some posts around merited posts;
- Reading last few posts.

[4] Reading the day of last post
It does not always true but creating new post to reply to such topics most likely spamming, then your posts most likely will be reported or deleted by mods.

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Other stuffs for Writing

The forum would look much better in the event that the majority abide by these instructions, which of course is not the case. What is easy to notice that most users read only title and first / last post, so actually the majority of posts not say anything new. I remember one thread where OP is try to test this theory, so he make some clickbait title and nice first post which support title - but in second post he explain his intentions. Most posters show that even second post is not important to them, they stick to title and first post.

All this results in a large amount of spam, and then we have option to report such posts to mods or to ignore users. Some members simply ignore the whole boards, for the reason that they are littered with spam and low quality content.

Hi Lucius,
You got me. I have known that but forgot to write it down when composing the OP. With your help, I already the OP. I thank you so much for your valuable reply

I've been reading bitcointalk offline (or rather without having logged in) for a while now.  Some people seem to just stay logged in which I feel isn't a good idea when it comes to hacking.

Perhaps people, not just newbies be encouraged to read articles offline and then once they are inclined to post they then log in to post.  I would add to that that if a person is inactive for say an hour they are logged out for security reasons.

I've logged back in due to BitCoin having regained ground back to $6,000 in a relatively short period of time and stumbled across this thread. Kudos.

It depends on the context too. If you use a personal device that never leaves your place, it might be okay to use forever logged in feature or something similar. On top of that, you need to log in if you want to post a reply which most people do here.

It's just a matter of style imo. Anyway, as long as they can post constructive post, we don't really care how you do it (logging in when you need to post or stay logged in forever).

I doubt that hacking can take advantage of the fact that one browses the forum while being logged-in instead of not being logged-in, although you could state that a key logger may catch your credentials or you may end-up trying to log into the ".to" version of the site.

In addition, being logged-in enables you to see the Trust scores associated to user profiles (visible on the left by the post in some boards, or when you see someone’s profile). That in a sense is a part (often small, sometimes large) of the context to reading a person’s posts, and can only be seen while logged into the forum.

Agreed, people should have official accounts and should log in to be able to use all features of the forum (Trust, Merit and so on). Even the admin actually added new Warning for visitors, it will be better for them with official and logged-in accounts.
Guests - Read Warnings on potential scam projects started by Neg Trust Users (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5136667.0)
Without accounts, visitors can not ask for help or simply ask for explanations/ clarifications when they see interesting posts.

Well, if there is something you found and you wanted to share the information here then do a summarization of that information where you focus on the important information without making your post into a copy/paste but still it's not your idea then all you have to do is to credit the owner or you add the "website'" of the source where you found it.