Although vujsa has made several good points. It is also very important that you do not ramble with your posts. It may get you a lot of credits, but it is more harmful than short posts sometimes. In addition, if the moderators see a post rambling, or off topic, we may edit the post to delete parts or truncate parts. And the credit script has recently been modified so that every edit a post is recalculated for credits, and you usually lose more credits for a deletion edit than the same amount of text earned you in the first place. And as far as how many credits you can earn, there is a cap. Even if you have a 1000000 word post, it may only earn as many credits as a 1000 word post. I beleive that the tutorial forum has a larger cap than the other forums, but I'm not sure. So don't cram everytihng into one post, only relevant material, then wait for questions, or start a new topic specifically about information extraneous but somewhat related to the topic you are replying to.

~Viz

Okay... I get it. This seems to be a pretty exact explaination. I understand the ideas of being very exact when posting, and the whole "the more info, the better" thing. So, I'll try to do just that. Although I don't know about an introduction, a body, and then a conclusion. I guess that would be sensible if you were starting a new thread, but I think I'll just stick with a paragraph or two when I'm responding to one.

It's a way of expressing yourself when you talk to other people.
the Introduction is the first part of your topic : 'Hi, Folks, my name is BlahBlah, I would like to talk about Blahblah. At the end of this session, you will be able to .... (wirte down an E-mail, power on a DS Lite, or anything else which is the main subject of your topic).
then comes the main body of your topic, where you explain the thing.
And then come the conclusion, some sentences resuming clearly where we came from and what is the current situation ("Vote for myself !" or "Let's use Linux on Intel Computers",) what about is your subject, but the conclusion is the clear statement of what you think about this subject as expressed by the text body.

Hi all,
this is actually my first post and to be honest the main reason I was in the forum is to get more credits so that I can get free hosting - and for that I need to post. So you can see why the topic that got my attention and my first post was this one - replying to get the most from your post.

After reading your analyses, which are both interesting and insightful, I think I may have gotten the hang of it; although I'm still not sure since its my first post and I dont know how much credit it will get me. However, doesn't this encourage redundant, superflous and repetitive writing? This is in my humble opinion only - but I do recall my english teacher telling us that the best way to write an article is to get straight to the point and to cut out the redundant words.

Perhaps we could suggest to the adminstrators of the website that there could be some other way to gain credits. Relevance perhaps? I do know, thanks to your enlightening articles, that the posts are read or calculated by mechanical means - meaning that credits are given based on certain criteria. Does this mean that a post which does not make much sense but has all the key words relevant to the post title will get lots of points? I'm just asking - I dont know the answer myself.

Perhaps some of the other readers can give suggestions???

Probably yes. However, I would like to advice you not to do that. The moderators also read your posts, and if they decide that your post is a spam, your credits will be removed. And, who know, you could se removing more credits than the credits obtained by useless and repetitive writings.
The aim of this post was different : once you have a brillant idea, if you are answering a question of somebody urgently needing help, your post would be more credits worht if you explain yourself clearly and if you say something useful and interesting.
Just try it, you will see that useful posts give more credits than useless blah-blah.

This is especially true because the moderators do catch most of the spam, and garbage posts, and we are continually updating the tools we have to make it easier to deal with. And having a post (or even a block of text inside a post) will lose more credits than making the post earned in the first place.

~viz

That was a very interesting tutorial. It may help me out a little. It was almost a flawless tutorial besides the few word errors I seen at the beginning of the topic. (but I still understood it) I read the hole thing and I promise to try to do my best to make my posts and my topics more professional and clearer. It may take a while to work on it, but I'm sure I will soon get to that point. I have a small question though. So how does your points decrease? Lets just say for example I had fourteen credits and I leave for maybe a week or two. Would that take all my credits away? If not how many would I have left? Because I would really hate to create a nice website then soon after I get sick for about a week and my site gets deleted. All in all I think it was a really great tutorial. I learned a little bit today and I hope to keep learning more from this site. So that's why I have decided to stick around. I would also like to say thanks for that miniature html tutorial. I know it wasn't much, but it was more then I already knew. Maybe I will search around this site and try to find a complete tutorial.

Well I tried to write a good post. I don't know how well I did. Maybe someone can tell me some things I did wrong. Unless this isn't the topic to discuss that in.

Edit- This post got me 5 points. That's pretty good, but I bet your tutorial on how to post better got you like 200 points didn't it.

This post has been edited by dropkicksidekick: Mar 1 2007, 09:15 PM

Each day, one point less.
One day you have ten points in your account. Five days later you have five days less.
The trick is, you should earn enough points (let's seay earn five points) in order to be able to stay several days in case of being too busy, or using a lot of time for writing correctly an interesting topic, with correct sentences and being easily readable and interesting enough to make people keep reading you.
What this topic says is that correctly written topics make you earn more credit than useless spam or blah-blah.

I agree with the entire tutorial ,the long posts also helps to make an impact for your point and the biggest problem when people write only for credits is that they cant go indepth about it,but once you post only to those topics which you like and have a knowledge about it ,there is no problem of writing big post there because you know about the topic and how far the particular topic goes,innseccary extending of post with smilies and all should also be avoided.the best tip is if you know the topic well you can write more about it or just learn to babble about stuff and you will get big posts

I have another question related to the Credit System. Is it possible that an staff member gives you additional credits if the content of the post (not only the number of words) is very good.

Lets say for example. If I write a post of 500 words so it will aprox. earn about 5.00 credits automatically by the system. An few hours or days after, an staff member reviews the article and says: "hey! what a great article! oh yes! it is really usefull!... it desires some extra credits!" and he gives me 3 or 4 extra credits.

Is that possible? or only the automated system will grade our posts and staff members just deal with bad posts?