This sites methode of doing it's ratins is so hostile shoild i bother to stay with it? Down-grading for minor spelling,grammer errors.These questions and answers that are posted here are first drafts.A author would consider them first drafts!.And a author does at least one draft before the final draft! One draft authors are experienced.And I'm not going to hand write out a first draft first before typing into your page.I'm not getting paid to write here!No one is!So why the hostility?
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9\$\begingroup\$ @GLANTH It's not a question of hostility. If your posts are getting downvotes, it's because users see your posts as low quality, off-topic, or unsuitable for the site. \$\endgroup\$– MinimanCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 1:05
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16\$\begingroup\$ To the draft point, these should not be first drafts. They should be at worst second drafts (please). Write it, read it over again, and then make edits and submit. \$\endgroup\$– wax eagleCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 1:06
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7\$\begingroup\$ And please, read some of the information available in the help centre about what makes a good question or answer. \$\endgroup\$– MinimanCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 1:07
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11\$\begingroup\$ People generally don’t downvote for minor spelling and grammar errors. Please put more effort into writing clearly, as beyond a certain point difficult writing becomes practically impossible to read. \$\endgroup\$– B. SzonyeCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 1:28
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9\$\begingroup\$ Normally, if there's minor spelling or grammar errors, a user will just edit your post to make it more readable. If its so bad we can't tell what you mean, though, we downvote for that. More importantly, if you post an answer that doesn't answer the question asked, that will get deleted or downvoted into oblivion. Likewise if a question shows zero research effort. \$\endgroup\$– gatherer818Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 3:15
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9\$\begingroup\$ GLANTH, I noticed you were concerned in some answers of yours that we might be editing or downvoting for reputation. Many of us (including the people who've been editing your answers) do not receive reputation for edits; that ceases to happen after 2,000 reputation. Also, downvotes cost us 1 reputation. We have no personal ulterior motive for editing or voting on your posts. We're editing stuff where we can improve it, and downvoting stuff that is poor quality, that's it. \$\endgroup\$– doppelgreenerCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 23:49
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2 Answers
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You need to understand you are joining a community with certain expectations and rules.
Most importantly, that you should be contributing answers to the question posed, see the help center for more. About half your answers got deleted for being forum-chat tangentially talking about the topic and not answers. Regardless of spelling, grammar, and formatting, those are always disallowed.
Many of the others - there's a broad line between "first draft" and "incoherent" and many of your posts have erred towards the "I can't figure out what the heck he's talking about" side of that. People downvote those. Go hover over the downvote button, it says "This answer is not useful." I'm afraid that your communication style pushes it over to "not useful." Even when people point it out, you are unwilling to clean up/clarify your statements.
We the site mods sent you a mod message previously about this problem with information on how to work with the site; it doesn't really bode well that you seem to have ignored that in favor of just screaming a complaint on the main site. If you're having issues, don't post them on the main site - post them here on meta, since that's what meta is for. Which you would probably know if you cared to bother to read a bit of the help center.
In general you seem to be unwilling to bother doing a token amount of understanding how we do things around here. Is that our fault? Everyone has tried to explain the problems to you and point you to resources to help you do better.
We would love for you to participate constructively in the site. Watch for a while and see how we do that here, maybe. But if you insist on just posting tangents that are quite hard to understand, they will rightfully still get downvotes for not being helpful to the question on which they are posted.
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\$\begingroup\$ For what it's worth (admittedly not much), he does have the Informed badge. But that's the tour, not the help center. \$\endgroup\$– BESWCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 9:40
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Stackexchange vs. a forum
Stackexchange is designed to be an archive of questions and answers - easy to reference, easy to get an idea of useful information. This is very different than a discussion forum, which is much more casual and designed to be an informal conversation.
On a forum, you can ask a question and spend 2-3 pages going back and forth and clarifying what you mean and it's great for you in the moment - it's a complete nightmare for anyone going back to try to get a quick and easy question-answer reference. Because Stack Exchange is set up to be easy to reference, you're expected to put a little more time into framing your questions and putting out your answers, so other people can get the value from it easily.
(I speak from much personal experience. A lot of the great RPG knowledge I got came from stuff on the now closed Forge Forums, but, I would never point someone to dig through the archives for an easy idea on anything. A lot of those ideas are basically scattered across months or years of threads...)
Mutuality is your payment
You came to Stack Exchange to get some help, right? Presumably you looked around and saw some other questions and answers and decided you'd get decent answers or help here, as opposed to the many, many, many other rpg forums on the internet, right?
The cost of getting thoughtful answers and help is that people expect you to take the time to make thoughtful and clear questions and comments as well.
I make minor typos or formatting errors pretty often, but it's not a big deal because I put enough effort in to show I'm at least acting in good faith to try to make things easy for people to read and digest. I often will take a look at the preview and double check what I've put together to make sure it reads easily enough.
You're right, you're not getting paid to write here, no one else is either. Good faith and a little consideration goes both ways.
Other Possible Issues
If you're working with some situation that makes this especially hard (english as a second language, learning disabilities, etc.) it might help to ask on Meta if anyone can point you to some better resources to help improve things. I know the spell check in the comment box helps me often enough.
