Forum:SH Archive/Manual of style: Citing forum posts

For various reasons, we sometimes need to cite specific posts or threads on a forum; we don't really have a consistent way of doing so, though, so I figure we should come up with a citation format.

A few things that I think every forum citation should have:
 * 1) The thread title.
 * 2) The forum name.
 * 3) If it's citing just one post in the thread:
 * 4) A specific link to the post.
 * 5) The time and date the post was made.
 * 6) The poster name.

So I propose a formatting something along these lines:


 * For an overall thread:
 * Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor on the Jedi Council Forums
 * For a specific post:
 * Legacy #11: The Ghosts of Ossus, part 1 (of 2) - Vader wants his damn pants back! on the Jedi Council Forums (Posted 4/4/07 1:05 PM by Jan_Duursema)

I just used TFN for that, but it would apply to any forum. While I think all the elements I've included should be in there, some things to consider are: These are fairly trivial matters, but I think anchoring them down for a consistent look would be a good thing.
 * Date formatting: We could do it in one specific format, or we could do it as the board lists it, if that's not an option that can be changed (this is what I've done above).
 * Punctuation: I've been using &mdash; for this in my articles, but Bly uses parentheses, which I rather like; I've used them above.
 * The order of all the various elements.

Linking to a specific post
This isn't a CT item, but rather advice. If we do have an MoS entry on this, we should probably include something like this so people know how to do it.

A lot of forum software has some way of linking directly to a post; usually a link on each post that says "URL" or "anchor" or "#". Unfortunately, the two most commonly cited forums, the Jedi Council Forums and Starwars.com message boards, don't.

Jedi Council Forums
Unfortunately you can't link to just one post on the JC. However, there is a link that will always link you to the page the post is on, regardless of how many posts you have set to display per page.

This is assuming you've already found the post in the thread. Let's say I want to quote a jasonfry post from the Galactic Cartography thread about the Atlas. On my page settings it's here:

http://boards.theforce.net/literature/b10003/21938930/p52

But that doesn't work for someone with 15 or 50 posts per page. Click on "Post History" under the post, which takes you to jasonfry's post history. Then, and this can be tedious if the poster has made a lot of posts, go through the pages until you reach the date and time of the post you want to quote (for Fry, we'd be lucky; it's his second to last post when I quoted this). Then copy the URL:

http://boards.theforce.net/Message.aspx?topic=21938930&brd=10003&start=28246682

And that will always link you to the right page.

Starwars.com
This is easier. First find the page. In this case, let's quote a Tasty Taste post about how WEG used to be S-canon. Here's the page:

http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa?threadID=152583&start=1815

Note the "start=1815": that's the post count. Just count how many posts below the first one Tasty's post is, and add it to that. In this case it's 3 after (that is, it's the fourth one on the page), so adding 3 gives you 1818:

http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa?threadID=152583&start=1818

-- Lord Hydronium 20:52, 29 April 2008 (UTC)