If there’s one thing bloggers are universally good at, it’s naval navel gazing. So excuse me as I attempt to do that right now and offer a few tips on how not to piss people off on the tubes.

Last week, Anna posted about communication troubles she’s had dealing with random people on this wonderful tool known as the Internet. If you haven’t read it it yet, I strongly encourage you to do so.

(I’ll be using us bloggers as an example, but really, this should be applied to anyone in WoW or elsewhere. And your milage may vary.)

As bloggers, we’re mostly a unique breed of your garden-variety WoWer. We try to be open, accessible and offer tips on anything that fits within our narrow scope of so-called expertise. Here, hopefully, you’re getting tips on roleplaying. Other sites might help you be the best warlock/hunter/priest you can be. Most blogs even have contact information with something as mundane as an email address. Others still might have an IM address. Still others might have a link to our armory, giving you a very clear look into our character’s name, server and gear.

What we’re attempting to do is give our readers a means by which to communicate directly with us outside of simply using the comment fields within a particular post. If you have a specific question regarding what our respective niches are, we welcome those questions and will normally do our best to answer them as best we can.

What we’re not doing is giving people carte blanche to harass us. I’ll give two examples in my typically not-so-subtle manner and let you choose which of the two we bloggers would deem ok.

Example 1:“Arrens, I love your blog and am a long-time reader. I was wondering if you could tell me what RP mods you recommend since I’m new to the RP scene and don’t want to come off as a scrub.”

Example 2:“Dude! Love your site. Hey, man, I was wondering if I could bum a few hundred gold off of you and then tell you all the troubles and woes going on in my real life even though you don’t know me from Adam and then you can give me some sage advice on how best to tell my employer that he’s a total fuckwad and, oooh, is that an epic dagger you have? Where’d you get it? Can I have one too? And how about a Deadmines run? Please, please please?!”

Pretty blatantly obvious, no?

If a person is looking to contact me, particularly in-game, there’s a few things I’d prefer they do first.

1. Type “/who Arrens” and find out where the hell I’m at. If I’m in the middle of a dungeon, raid or battleground, now’s probably not the best time to get my attention if you’re expecting a reply. Odds are pretty good I’m busy. If I’m in the middle of Dalaran or any other major city, go ahead and whisper away. If I’m busy, I’ll say so. If I don’t respond right away, I may be away from the keyboard for a moment.
2. Tell me who they are. If they’re a blog reader looking for advice, that’d be a great thing to know. First off, it might prove to be a useful topic for a later blog post, something I haven’t covered extensively yet. Secondly, it lets me know that they’re not some random player on my server looking for a free ride through Ragefire Chasm or Stockades and should be placed on my ignore list.
3. Use the KISS method. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Understand that I’m in the game for a reason: To enjoy myself. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to help people. Of course I do. But it also doesn’t mean I prefer setting an hour or better aside in my limited playtime to help someone who hasn’t done a bit of research on their own. I might be willing to walk them through certain aspects of setting up a roleplaying mod, but it doesn’t mean I’m willing to spoon feed them a character backstory or explain 10,000+ years of Warcraft history. Ask the question, get the rudimentary answer and go forward with it. If, at the end, they’re still confused, contact me again…when I’m not busy.

Back during Burning Crusade, my warlock jumped servers a number of times to get away from some rather overwhelming server drama that seemed to follow me like a dark cloud. Eventually, I ended up on Drenden because of the large number of raiding guilds there. It was also when BRK was in his heyday and he had recently linked to my old warlock blog. I sent him a tell saying thank you for both linking to me and providing content that, although it had little use to my class, was still a damned fine read every day and one I strongly recommended to every huntard I came across. He thanked me for giving out those recommendations and was pleased he could provide some reader love to my little space on the Internet. And that was that. A simple conversation. A “thank you” and a “you’re welcome,” with none of the excess that typically goes along with it.

Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?