All discussion relevant to Countdown that is not too spoilerific. New members: come here first to introduce yourself. We don't bite, or at least rarely.
I came across this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark recently, and it occurred to me that it might be worth adding to the array of smilies available to reduce misunderstandings.
I am aware that there are people around who'll be insulted by the suggestion that it's not sufficiently obvious that their post is ironic if it's not flagged as such - but I hope that its use might cool some of the exchanges on the forum.
(On the other hand, there do seem to be some members who delight in sniping at one another, which does get rather boring for the rest of us. )
I never thought of adopting additional punctuation marks before, but it sort of makes sense. There definitely needs to be more exclamation marks, since whenever I read something that ends with an exclamation mark I always think it's meant to be slightly humorous, even though a lot of the time an exclamation mark comes at the end of an angry or authoratative sentence.
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