Now that I’ve dutifully closed FAIL’s ”I found a misspelling” thread, I thought I would start a new thread outlining the ground rules to flagging typos through our bug report system. I thought I would…and I did! (As you can clearly see.)

I’ll eventually go through that old thread, but from here on in, you’re much better off reporting typos as bugs.

Properly reporting a spelling or grammar mistake can earn you the “Ol’ Spread-Eagle Eyes” E-Peen™. But too many people have been overzealous in their pursuit of this coveted badge of honor. Hence…

THE RULES:

– Anything in a community-built forum (i.e., Forumbuildr) doesn’t count. Unless there’s a badly formed madlib (which should’ve been voted out to begin with). That goes for the forum’s description, which we don’t write.

– Anything in blogs or on Flamebate doesn’t count. Basically, it’s got to be part of the game proper. Reporting an admin’s Flamebate typo might get you banned. That’s how annoying it is.

– Anything posted in Spoilerpedia doesn’t count. For Christ’s sake, it’s the ****ing walkthrough anyone can edit! If there’s a typo, just fix it!

– Petty, straw-grasping matters of style don’t count. People send in reports of “typos” when they’re really just flagging our use of casual English. This isn’t a textbook, people. Please don’t waste our time with trivialities.

– Stuff that nobody could possibly give a **** about doesn’t count. This covers a lot of territory, and it’s a bit vague, but think before you post: Is this really an issue? Do I really think this is worth posting about? Or am I just trying to get an E-Peen™? (And yes, we know the feed for E-Peens is still referred to as “exploits” on their user profile. We can’t fix that. Ever.) For instance, yes, sometimes Bruce Bear types without a “lisp.” That’s because it would be ridiculous to try to read otherwise.

– Stuff that isn’t actually wrong doesn’t count. We try to be consistent with our use of American English. That means reformed spelling, punctuation within the quotation marks and no Oxford commas (as in this sentence). However, being Canadian, we might slip up once in a while — and we kinda don’t care. This is a big site with lots of text. Even The New York Times has inconsistencies. We’re looking for major, obvious errors.

– Spelling errors within forums that are obviously created by our Unintelligencer machine translation tool don’t count! I’m amazed that people actually bring them up.

NOTE: A lot of stuff is buried deep within the code and I can’t access it myself. So text apart from item descriptions, bookmarks, conversations and so on are Evil Trout’s domain, and not likely to be corrected anytime soon. Unfortunately, that may delay your Peen indefinitely.

Thanks for continuing to improve this amateurishly written site! For further information on the Forumwarz Style Guide, feel free to send me a Tubmail.