For the longest time that I have been reading the General Discussion Forum. I have gotten the feeling that most people don’t actually read the entire thread. Because I have noticed that people keep repeating the same reply post to the topic many times as if they have not read the other peoples replies. At times it seem people only read the Title and then respond to that only without reading the OP’s body of text.
At other times the responses don’t even align with the subject. Like:
Original Post: “Hi, all. I want to discuss the fire mages rotations.”
Response number 1: “Hunters should get the bang sound back.”
Response number 2: “How dare you post about catgirls. Go play FF!”
Response number 3: “Well Fury Warriors should not have frost spells!”
Response number 4: “Oh I am against this topic, Whatever it is.”
Response number 4: “TL;DR. You don’t really expect me to read a full paragraph?
So my question is how do you read and respond to a topic post?
Forumers are mostly focused on how they can get their “gotcha” or how they can try and soft troll, especially if the OP is someone they don’t like and even more so if they think they can farm likes out of it.
If it is a real concern, question, or feedback, I’ll read it all and provide actual feedback.
If it is just a whine, rant, or troll - I’ll skim, and give it as much respect as it gave the forum audience.
If it is a GenAI-enhanced post (most are obvious, even those who try to make it look like they’ve written it), I give it the response it deserves and then ignore it.
my response is usually rooted from the title since people seem to be a fast tracking actual conversation these days and they put their question in the title and then the OP simply says “title“. It would be more helpful if the title were about the topic and then the OP was actually discussing what was intended to be discussed about the topic. Then again most threads end up devolving into forum PVP.
I read the date. If it’s fairly current, skip to the bottom. If it’s old, read maybe the last 10-12 posts which are invariably an argument between two people. Then I give up, and post what I think is related to the topic, rather than the incessant bickering.
Let’s face it. There’s a reason people have 10k posts - they are timely and engaged beyond what most of us can do.
I reply to the OP (original poster), and the discussion between the initial topic and my response sometimes interests me. Most of it is trolling, unnecessary comments; there are people who have never contributed anything to the forum or any conversation, but they insist on responding to disrupt, make fun, or simply belittle opinions, and I avoid that.
I generally try to read it all and then post, usually post longer to address the whole thing and provide context. Feel like short responses turn into 200 posts of people arguing in shorter gotcha responses. To be fair, longer posts get nit picked so it’s really just an exercise in futility
It depends on the headline. Some are intentional baiting topics, and they are fun to jump in on and be snarky to each other. Some people have agenda, and I tend to skip those. And some topics are what I am interested in, and I’ll read every comment and then leave my own point of view. Having said that, I skip the bulk of the topics as not my cup o’ tea.
However, having replied, I do think that I’ve earned a like click.
That is my gripe about the forums. It took me a while to figure it out but there are a lot of forum topics and questions that seem general (healer dps) but are really (really really) about M+ dungeons. In fact, the bulk of forum postings are from people who pug into these speed runs and return here to squawk about their experience. I think that those guys are so into what they do that they assume everyone knows what they mean.
