Is it Rude to Type in All Caps?

This is a tough question. I am going to speculate that somewhere along the Internet highway, someone decided that typing in all capital letters was considered yelling. Once this new information was passed along, everyone started to believe it and at that point it became offensive rather than simply annoying.So, is it yelling?

Certainly there are times when players use caps to essentially yell their message. But, on the other hand, for some of our players eyesight is an issue, and believe it or not, the size difference between lowercase letters and uppercase letters make a marked difference. This is why you will often see “CAPS ONLY” rooms in many of the Pogo games.It sounds like you are politely trying to educate these people on how chat in uppercase is perceived by the majority of other players. And it sounds like in some cases your education efforts have paid off. You may want to add one step to what your doing by checking in with the uppercase chatter to see if he or she is using them to see the chat better. At that point, you may also want to politely inform the player that it is possible to change the size of the chat by clicking “Chat Options” and choosing “Big Text.”

However, understand that while the big text helps, in some rooms the chat window is so small that it’s hard to follow the conversation, so they may have a valid reason for not doing that.You can certainly ask people to stop, but anytime you ask someone to not do something they’re doing, you may incur their wrath. There’s nothing you or I can say to stop some players from getting defensive or rude. If you ask someone to stop and they proceed to get nasty, then I recommend that you simply mute them and don’t let them ruin your day.

Thanks for writing. Boy did Ms. Nettie get a lot of e-mail about this, from both sides of the issue. This is the last letter I will answer regarding this, so folks, please read carefully.

Many people seemed to think that I was suggesting that people should use the “Report Abuse” feature at the first sight of gibberish. This is not the case. The original letter writer complained that the gibberish was filling up the entire screen and making it impossible to chat. When the letter writer asked that the gibberish stop, the parent of the child called her a nasty name. It doesn’t matter if it’s a child, a chimp, a parent or a parrot, the act of chat disruption is a Terms of Service violation, and it can result in warnings or suspensions.We all know that children will be children and we are forgiving when a child gets their hands on the keyboard for a short time. However, keyboards are not toys and while kids will certainly be kids, parents should not allow them to disrupt the chat area simply so that they may amuse themselves.

A few people wrote in with some great suggestions to help parents keep their children happy, and keep the chat room available for those having conversations. Some of these suggestions include:

– Turn off chat

– Find a friend who will tolerate the gibberish and start up a Private Chat window

– Find or purchase an old or cheap keyboard, cut off the cord, and allow the child to play with that while you use your keyboard to chat

I’d like to thank the players who made these suggestions. There were also several players who cautioned parents that letting a child use a keyboard for a toy could have negative results as the child gets older. One letter writer was concerned that children who use keyboards as toys could end up destroying keyboards at other people’s homes. Another parent felt that it was important that children understand the difference between tools and toys from a very early age. A few parents felt that it was fine to let the kids play with the keyboards because the children would eventually outgrow the desire to play with a keyboard. One parent wanted to remind everyone that if you do decide to give your child a keyboard, make sure you cut off the cord so the child does not hurt him or herself.