How To:Get the Most Out Of Your Forum Post

Basic guidelines

These guidelines are maintained by the community. They are not the Forum Rules or Travellerspoint's Terms & Conditions. If you feel something could be improved, feel free to edit.

Be brief

Contrary to what you may think, not everyone is good at retrieving information from lengthy pieces of written text. If you post a screen-filling story in which you document your travel plans in great detail, the chances are that people will be either unable or unwilling to identify the three or four questions that you have hidden inside the text. It's much better be brief and relevant.

Be specific

• About needed feedback: do you want to hear about other people's opinions, or is it factual information that you're looking for?
• About times: a few days is not a good description of a time period. Use a specific number of days
• About seasons: sometime next summer is bound to cause confusion. Would that be austral or boreal summer? Use specific months instead
• About your own situation: if you're asking a question about entry requirements or visas always give your citizenship.
• About everything else:

Be structured

As in any other forum, 5% of the contributors make 95% of the useful contributions. These people read a lot of posts and are consequently most likely to answer first to those they can quickly understand. You can help by being structured:

• Give your new thread a title that makes clear what it is about. A question would be a very poor title whereas Question: hostel prices in Estonia would be an excellent title.
• Give some context to your questions. This increases the chance of getting the answers you want.
• List questions separately, preferably in a bulleted list
• Add any relevant information to each specific question.
• Start a new thread if you have a new question

Do not be a leech

• Some questions take considerable time and effort to answer. Thanks as well as feedback on the usefulness of the answer are much appreciated
• Use TP's search function before you post to see whether your question has been recently answered.
• Google is your friend. Show that you have made some effort to find the answer to your question by yourself before turning to others. It also stops people giving you information that you already know.
• Do simple basics yourself. For instance,if you're asking about travel in the Euro zone convert any amounts that you mention to euro.

Be comprehensible

Many TP users do not have English as their first language. It's great if you have, but please try not to use non-standard expressions, slang, phonetic writing, text-messaging shorthand and anything else that may lead to confusion. Also, it's better not to be 'Shakespearian'; clear, simple sentences work best.