Is there a rule against illiteracy?
 

There should be. I don't think many of the members of this forum are illiterate, but I've run into at least one. It's a pain in the butt to have to read drek such as the following:
H3LL0!!!!! 1 L1K3 S0RDS! DO JOO L1K3 SORDS? SCR3 U!!!! L0L!
Why?
A) Makes no sense.
B) Hard to read.
C) Why use numbers instead of letter, for god's sake?!
SO, what do you think? Should there be a rule against illiteracy?

I think those people just end up leaving anyway.

I do agree, it annoys me to no end. I also hate constantly seeing "teh".

Go back and edit damnit!

I've really only done that if I'm typing fast.

As for those who think Leet speak is the only way to talk, well, they find that this isn't the place to do it, due to the efforts of the Mods.

I am putting up a new policy: anyone who uses leet speak when I'm around will be blasted with a negative reputation point.

"You gotta ask yourself one question Leet boy: do I feel lucky? well do ya? punk?!"

This is at it's worst in RP threads. With run-on sentences, lack of punctuation, misspellings, and other gramatical errors in what is virtually a novel with 6-13 authors...well, it doesn't work.

However, a rule against this? That's a little extreme, considering some people have broken keyboards or don't speak english as a primary language; with that, it's bound to happen.

Well, it's not just l33t-type(come on, you gotta agree that it's "type," since you can't "speak" l33t) that equates to illiteracy. There's also the people who use no punctuation, capitalization, grammatically correct sentences, full words, etc. I think only one member of the board current does that.

"lol i rock do u rock 2"

I think it's a question, but I can't tell without a question mark. Or maybe it's supposed to be two, or even three, separate statements. If I can't tell, I just skip it and one person's "input" goes unacknowledged.

But yeah, this board is pretty clean of those types of people.

omg u r al teh suxorz to thos tht cn't spll omgwtflol!!!11!!!11

Ow, my fingers burn just from typing that garbage!

While I agree that a bad typer is not something you really want around, there are multiple types of bad typers. L33T Speak is always on purpose, and I simply ignore those people, although I have never seen a person join the board and only use L33T Speak. I only see it used in an insulting or derogatory way to mock someone. There are also those with poor spellings or have a few mistyped words. "teh", "taht", "waht" etc. I have been known to do some of these, and they usually come from typing too fast and making a small error. These I forgive since I make them, and I'm not a spelling nazi, and they aren't a consistent problem. I may have one or two of these to a paragraph or greater long post. If you have one spelling error in your whole post, I don't see the problem with it. There are also those from other countries where English isn't their first language, and it is easy to forgive their spelling mistakes. However, then we get to the above example *points to top of post*. Those types of people do it on purpose, because they are too lazy or ignorant to just ype out the words. These are the people that join an RP and crap it up until everyone else tells them to leave. These are the people that join in a serious discussion and give some random, half-assed, no thought response., Generally, these people either weed themselves out, or get banned for spamming or some other big forum no-no. Basically, these people take care of themselves. So in my opinion, a Rule stating that you cannot type like that seems to strict and unfair to those that make small mistakes or those that have trouble typing proper English due to a language barrier. If you want to type like an idiot, I say let them, but just know that no one will take you seriously until you learn to type like a decent human being, and this seems to be a problem that regulates itself since many of them find they aren't welcome on the board with bad grammer.

Just my two cents on the issue at hand.

I have to agree with Forever Zero here. I am terribly illiterate in that I can't spell worth a damn. If you're making a long post, it's a good idea to run it through word to spell-check, but I'm not going to do that on every post I make.

Secondly, I am against a perma-ban of l33tsp34k. I believe there is a big difference between a random "sw33t" and "1 L1K3 S0RDS". What's the difference? Intent. The n00bs comment was intended to be stupid (or cool, if he/she is 5), while my comment was to show how cool I thought something was while using as few words as possible.

How about instead of a ban against illiteracy, a ban against stupid people. Actually, I think this is already in place, am I correct?