A Dooyoo themed Room 101 (Room 101)

Member Name: JonnyM79

Product:	Room 101
Date:	25/03/02 (67 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I feel much calmer now

Disadvantages: Please don't take anything personally

I would like to put the following Dooyoo contributors into Room 101..........

Only joking. The reason I'm actually writing this is as follows: there are lots of things that people do on Dooyoo that annoy me, either a little or a lot. Now if I were to give everyone a good slagging off every time they did one of these things I would come across as a bad tempered, foul mouthed wanker (I am one really, but I try to hide it), and that's hardly the way to make friends and influence people. Therefore what I'm going to do is put all my moaning into one article so that for the rest of my time on Dooyoo I can disseminate sweetness and light. If you're in a good mood I suggest you stop reading now; I wouldn't want to ruin your day. So here we go; the following things, which are in no particular order, should all be banished to Room 101.

1) Writing in categories that are already full. There are currently 105 opinions on Harry Potter and 100 on Lord of the Rings (and that's just in films, I don't even want to look at the books). Anyone who feels tempted to add theirs should consider this: do you really think that you can add something that none of the first hundred have done? The only way to know for sure is to read every one of those opinions: have you done this? Come on! There are thousands upon thousands of categories with one, two or even no opinions at all in; surely you can find something interesting to say about some of those. As a general rule of thumb, if there are too many opinions in a category for me to read them all then it's not worth writing in. I'd much rather read about something completely new than the same item ad nauseam.

2) Spelling. This isn't bad spelling generally (I don't mind that) or people who criticize every spelling mistake of others (they could go in but Dooyoo seems mercifully to be largely free of them). It is in fact just one word, and that is "
definitely". Jon's lesson: It is spelled definitely because it is derived from the adjective finite. It is NOT spelled definately, as a large section of the population seem to think. Someone actually E-mailed me once to tell me that all my definites needed their spelling altering to definate, hence my irritation. I hope that by putting it here I will never be tempted to mention this personally to anyone, since I'm not normally that anal (honest).

3) Whingeing about crowns. I dealt with this in my last opinion which was on crowns, so I'll be brief. If your opinion didn't get a crown it's not because there's some sort of conspiracy or because everyone else is in a bizarre crown-absorbing clique. It's because it wasn't good enough. Deal with it.

4) Churning. In general it doesn't seem to be much of a problem, but for some reason the computer games section seems full of low quality opinions that scrape over the 70 word limit. It really puts you off reading in that section and is frustrating when you write reviews, since you know everyone else will assume they're the same as the rest of the drivel and won't even bother to read them. I don't know if it's because this category has a younger age group (although I've seen some excellent contributions from surprisingly young authors so I suspect not), or if it says something about your typical games player, but it is a real problem.

5) Overcorrected opinions. It's a certain style that you can tell the author's sat for ages in fron of a word processor, shifting paragraphs, changing words, punctuation and sentence structure until all continuity and thought flow has been destroyed. Just for the record I type straight into the Dooyoo window, I don't proofread and I'd urge others to do the same. I don't mind typos and spelling errors which I make plenty of myself (apart from definately, obviously), an
d would much rather read an opinion that follows a coherent line of thought or narrative than a perfectly punctuated collection of rearranged sentences.

6) Overblown titles. Puns and extravagant claims ("the best book ever!") I'll accept, but what is garaunteed to make me pass something by is either the USE OF CAPITALS as if that makes the title somehow more outstanding, or even worse the excessive use of exclamation marks!!!!!!!!! Both seem to be a fairly reliable indicator of lower quality writing.

Wow, that was even more caustic than I was intending. Having slagged off the rest of the Dooyoo community to high heaven, I guess I'm now an open target, so take it away in the comments section. I'm off to spread my new found tranquility by writing some complimentary comments and awarding some VUs.

Summary: