Yes, it is real. Also known as "Don't butcher the forum fauna" and "Stop being an [explicit] and act reasonable", depending on the act done and the times someone has pointed out how annoying it is.
Basically, it's the rule of "not making the forums annoying to navigate to others"/"not making threads hard or impossible to read". You are not supposed to necro threads for this reason (besides it being spam, most likely), you are not supposed to reply to a large amount of threads in a short time (besides it being spam, most likely) and you are not supposed to post in all code or all caps, or make threads with all caps titles, because it's annoying to look at, and no one likes being yelled at. All this is seemingly innocent ways to screw with others' experience of the forum and site.
Yes. The slightly less safe way to post is to not be oblivious about it. It's not like it isn't "common" sense not to post in twenty threads in ten minutes, when all your replies are "lol" or something to that respect, just like continuing to write like this would be horrifying to read if everyonewas doing the same thing. It's just annoying to read, and ON THE INTERNET CAPS HAS LOST THE CRUISE CONTROL EFFECT A LONG TIME AGO AND IS NOW JUST OBNOXIOUS. If someone feels the urge to do any of this, first wonder why no on else does it, and then imagine if they did*.
*Of course this does not count with people that doesn't bother reading other posts anyway.
In my opinion... Using 'Caps', 'bold', 'italic' and link/image code is a useful help in making nice posts... but I have to agree that using either of those singular makes for an irritating text looking like a 'squashed tomato' on the thread! =P
How about those clans that wanted to write in all-caps then? They were doing this for fun and got comments by other users all the time, eventually ending up in being slapped on the whrist pretty quickly... which surely prooves that the community is 'somewhat' self-regulating at best!
And if you didn't learn anything still from the wonderful explaining by the guys above me, then i recommend you go and read ChillzMaster and Highfire's posts. That's one of the most efficent ways to improve your ways of reasoning.
