Every so often we see a topic posted all in CAPITALS and the replies will often include a request not to do this. So, why is posting all in CAPITALS a bad thing?
Way back at the start of the internet, when most text was just typed out with no formatting ability, we needed a way of distinguishing between different ways of saying things, basically a code of conduct that we could all follow. This became known as Netiquette (i.e. network etiquette), and basically laid down some guidelines so that people could interact with others without causing upset.
Netiquette determined that if one wanted to shout at another person, one typed in CAPITALS. So, if someone were to type hey you, it would mean they were speaking normally, but if they typed HEY YOU, then they were actually shouting at you, and this is something which many users found (and still find) unacceptable or rude.
There is a second reason why typing all in CAPITALS is frowned upon, and that is lack of readability. Reading text all in CAPITALS is much harder for many people than reading text in sentence case. Similarly, typing all in lower case or without punctuation and/or capitals at the start of the sentence or for proper names is also harder to read.
Sentence case means starting a sentence with a capital letter, as I've done with this topic. If you were to start every word with a capital letter, that would be Title Case, and that is also harder to read properly.
It might also be useful to flag up how to emphasise text without the use of the board's built in BB Code, e.g. if you want to make a word stand out (i.e. as in
bold) you can use the older format of *bold* or _bold_.
Quoting earlier posts can sometimes be useful but excessive quoting slows down the board's database making it slower to load pages, so only quote the relevant part/s necessary to make your reply make sense.
There are lots of websites which cover Netiquette in greater detail, so it's not the intention of this topic to cover it further. This is simply an explanation of why others may jump on you if you do happen to post all in Capitals!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netiquette
