Minecraft Wiki:Talk page guidelines

Talk pages are useful for discussion, but lose their use if they are not used in an organized fashion. Below are some guidelines for using the talk pages.

General

 * 1) Talk pages are only for discussing the related content page. Topics should discuss the content of page as an article, except in the case of a user's main talk page, which may be used for direct discussion with the user. Talk pages should not be used for any of the following:
 * 2) Suggesting a new feature for Minecraft
 * 3) Reporting issues with the topic's behavior in Minecraft
 * 4) Discussing your opinion on the topic's existence or usage in Minecraft
 * 5) Acting as a tutorial, tutorial content should instead exist on the Tutorials sub pages.
 * 6) Acting as a content page or a proposed page or page rewrite. Content pages should be in a content namespace, and page proposals should be made in either in the Minecraft Wiki sandbox or a personal sandbox, and then may be linked to discuss.
 * 7) When replying to a topic, keep to the same topic as the initial topic. If the topic does not cover what you want to say, consider starting a new topic on the page. If replying to multiple topics at the same time, answer each topic within its own topic, rather than placing all replies in one place.
 * 8) Don't edit other user's comments, except to sign unsigned comments or fix formatting.
 * 9) Don't edit archives. They are called archives for a reason. Instead of replying to an archived topic, start a new topic with an optional link to the old one.
 * 10) Follow rule #5 maintaining civil discussions with no harassment, insults, or ad hominem.

Signing
Always sign your posts using. Your signature can be changed in your preferences, provided it fits the following criteria:
 * Your signature may not contain a template unless it is always substituted. The resulting code must be no more than 250 characters.
 * Do not use excessively large files or text in your signature.
 * Avoid using font colors that are similar to the background color, and font sizes that are excessively small.

If someone else did not sign their comment, sign it for them using unsigned.

Formatting
Along with following rules for usage of talk pages, good talk page formatting is helpful too. On talk pages, topics are denoted using an h2 header, and sub-topics can be denoted using an h3 header.

Always indent your replies to one level after the comment to which you are replying, unless you reach nine indents, in which case add outdent and use no indent.

Generally avoid using templates that are not designed for talk pages, as they may change or break at any time without ease of updating them. A list of talk page templates can be found here.

When discussing a category or a file, you should escape it using a colon before the namespace in the link.

A single topic
Initial topic -User 1
 * Reply -User 2
 * Reply to user 2 -User 3
 * Reply to user 1 -User 4
 * Reply with a link -User 2
 * Reply with a Category:Main -User 3

A subtopic
Initial sub topic post -User 5
 * Reply -User 1

When making a proposal, usually all responses are only one indent, and they use comment (or its shourcut c).

A proposal topic
A proposal -User 1
 * -User 2
 * Reason -User 3
 * Comment on user 3's post -User 4
 * -User 5
 * -User 6