Format Abuse

From SquadWiki

What do we mean by formatting abuse?

In IRC you can jazz up your text in a variety of ways including bold, highlighted, underlined, emphasis, CAPS, and colors. Used sparingly, it helps with meaning and amusement. Overused, it is Annoying. And we do not like Annoying.

• THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS AND AMOUNTS TO SHOUTING. WE DON'T LIKE BEING SHOUTED AT.
• It *is* also *annoying* when you **overuse** and of the **********emphasis************ marks!
• And even rainbows can give people headaches.
• Plus you never know what color people are using as a background; you might accidentally change your text color to their background color...
• like this!
• Or even this.
• Which can be a problem.
• And yes, it is possible to change the background color too. If you're going to do this, do it sparingly and not just to show that you can. And did I mention sparingly? That means "not very much". (And sparingly is also good, too, as well.)
• Even using bold all the time or too much is a lot like ALL UPPERCASE BECAUSE it feels like shouting. Remember: you are not a car dealership, and chat is not a radio station.
• The same goes for underlining. It just gets really old very quickly. We must emphasize this, because it's underlined.
• It gets to the point that we just want to /kick anyone who does this sort of stuff, just to get rid of the CONSTANT OVER-EMPHASIS and distractingness