Quite often I see posts pointing at a mistake in a post, correcting a previous post by the same author, or thanking people for their answers.

While the result of those post is to improve either the technical content of the site or its friendly atmosphere, I believe there are easy-but-often-overlooked ways to achieve the same result:

• instead of writing a post to correct a mistake, especially if it is a typo and your post would not add any new content to the thread just /msg the author in the ChatterBox (CB). It is more than likely that the mistake will be promptly fixed.
• instead of posting a new message with an errata, just update the original node (possible in most sections of the Monastery). If the update consists in more than fixing a typo you can add it at the end of the post, prefixed by Update:
• send thanks using /msg (note to Vroom: a nice improvement to this feature would be to allow a list of people to be messaged , /msg (merlyn chromatic Ovid tilly) I hate you guys, you know too much about Perl)

I think using these tricks would lower slightly the number of not-too-relevant posts and increase the signal/noise ratio of the site.

And if you are worried about XP's (more posts = more XP's) those kinds of post never get much votes anyway (I know, I know, PM experts will object that by lowering $NORM they increase the likelyhood of other posts to get XP's... let's not go there please ;--)

2006-04-14 Retitled by planetscape, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'Increasing the Signal/Noise ration of PM'

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