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New Poster Guidelines


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Some of our newer members have a lot of experience on other discussion boards and/or social media. Some have been reading the board for a long time, and have just chosen to post. Others have been posting to Ballet Talk for Dancers. For some this is their first experience on a message board.

  • Note:  we're not like social media, and our mission is not to replicate or "curate" it here.  Our tone and purposes are different.

The danger of writing this is that it will scare the perfectly reasonable people into not posting. The purpose of this thread is to provide guidelines, so that New Members are comfortable posting and get the best response from the Ballet Alert! community. If you're new to discussion boards, the post after this has some basics to get you started and put you at ease.

Please remember that when you first register, you will be in the "Registration Complete" group, and your first post(s) may not be visible to the board until a Moderator changes it to "visible." Once an Admin changes your group to "New Member," your posts will be visible automatically after the change is made.  (Posts before that need to be approved manually by Admins.)

We've been told that this board is like a garden party. We consider this a compliment.

New Poster Guidelines

* If you haven't already, please read existing posts on the site to get a feel for the tone of the site. You'll see quickly that the response to the Internet equivalent of slapping a stranger on the back and greeting him with a friendly insult will go down as well as if you had walked up to Sir Anthony Dowell on Opening Night at the Royal Opera House and done the same.

* Once you're familiar with the site in general, you'll notice patterns:

  • *Company forums differ from forum to forum and from country to country and city to city, in tone and in the number of regular posters. Please be respectful of the differences.
    * If you're new to ballet, the Discovering the Art forum is the perfect place to ask questions or to raise topics. No question is too basic here. We all started from the beginning, and there are enough people on Ballet Alert! who will be happy to help.
    * Forums in "Subtexts and Contexts" tend to have a more intellectual tone. If the thread has been discussing the historical greats from Karsavina through Fonteyn in Giselle, and you post, "Isn't [fill in newest young principal] the greatest Giselle EVER!!! :), you aren't likely to get an overwhelmingly positive response. However, if you can make an historically contextual argument for this, you'll be sure to engage the board in discussion.

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* If you have a question about how to understand the information in a thread -- anything from jargon to shorthand for a dancer's, company's, or choreographer's name to the underlying assumptions of the argument -- and you don't want to ask in the thread, Discovering the Art is a perfect place for your question, regardless of how much experience you have. Chances are, if you have a question, there are many others have the same one, but never asked.

* Please don't ask us to do your term paper for you. Google, Yahoo, and MSN searches are good for basic factual questions, if you have a foundation in dance already. But when the information on the Internet is conflicting -- please let us know what you've found already -- or your question is on a less-well-known topic, please ask, and chances are, someone will be able to help or point you in the right direction. If you are a ballet beginner, Discovering the Art is the place to ask about the basics.

* Quoting:

  • If you are responding to one specific post, please use the " "Reply" button at the bottom of that post to "quote" the post, especially if you disagree. Otherwise, the poster directly above your post will think you are speaking to him/her. 
  • If you are responding to more than one post, click the "+" for each post.
  • If you want to quote only a piece of a post, highlight it, and, your browser willing, you should see a little control that allows you to select "Quote."

* If a post takes the discussion off-course, feel free to post about the original topic. You don't need to create a segue from an off-topic post to your own.

* When you see a performance, please tell us about it! Especially local performances outside the NY/DC metro corridor, although posts from dance capitals are always welcome. Please introduce us to dancers and companies that we haven't seen. The blank posting box can be intimidating at first, and starting simple is fine.

 

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