Into The Forrst

On our recent changes to the Forrst Guidelines.

Howdy, folks. As of this morning, there are a few notable changes to the Forrst Guidelines I wanted to mention briefly.

Be proud of your posts. Please don’t post just for the sake of posting, or post things like “I was bored, LOL”. When commenting, try to say more than just “Great” or “Hate it”; the more thorough your feedback, the more reputation you’ll earn.

We clarified this guideline quite a bit, specifically in terms of one of the reasons why folks should provide thorough feedback.

Posts should have detailed titles and descriptions, and be well-formatted so other Forrsters have a clear idea about what they’re looking at. Also, teaser posts are fine, but photos of your screen or extreme crops are better posted elsewhere.

We added the bolded part — while it’s always fun to hint at that next big project you’re working on, we’d like to steer clear of the Forrst ecosystem becoming one too cluttered with low-context teaser shots and photos of screens.

Your posts and comments should be written with proper spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. In general, try to write things on Forrst as you’d write things to your clients or your employer.

This one’s brand new — Forrst is a community of both professional developers and designers, as well as up-and-coming talent. We previously didn’t mention anything about post and comment formatting, but the community has grown to the point where we’ve been seeing more than a few instances of posts or comments with good intent but poor formatting. We know not everyone’s the greatest writer (ourselves included), but we do feel that Forrst content can and should be on par with how you’d write a client or employer — properly formatted, no txt speak, and so forth.

We also updated the list of posts that probably aren’t a good fit for Forrst:

iOS homescreens and mods, work- and deskspaces, desktops, or desktop wallpaper

Desktop wallpaper and iOS mods, while certainly interesting, have tended to lead to terse posts without much detail behind the work. We also feel that there are better communities devoted more to customization, e.g. DeviantArt (of which we’re a big fan).

All in all, I’m really proud of how the Forrst community has continued to evolve and grow, and I feel our guidelines have played an important role in that. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read the new guidelines, as well as our brief summary of changes above. If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly: kyle at forrst.com.

Thanks,
Kyle