Posting tips for better service

Dear prabhu and all devotees,

        Nityananda! Gauranga! Hare Krishna! My pranams! You could try these : 1) Use the preview button to see how your post will look like when it is uploaded, then you can scroll down and make corrections when necessary

2) You could also first type in notepad or any other text editor and check it out before pasting it here. I would suggest using Microsoft Word as it can help you edit as you type and correct all the grammar, spelling and make it good.

3) The simple editor has its own inbuilt dictionary.

4) Or if you have any trouble, you could always send me your post to my email. Or any other devotee who is willing I could do the editing in my spare time. We are ready to help anyone facing difficulties in their forum services, if you have any. This may not be entirely practical as we all have enough engagements to not have time to edit our own articles already, but it's worth a try.

     I personally end up making a first draft, editing, then re-editing, then making some other adjustments and corrections, often replacing some content entirely before I come up with one proper post. Sometimes in reading very long articles which we see on the internet, we may not have enough time to go through it all because of our work and other commitments and we may end up just seeing the starting lines and posting them. However the web is not always reliable and a closer look will show many things wrong, which later causes shock and embarrassment to everyone for no fault of ours. Neither you nor I nor anyone else has any intention to put up anything wrong on the forum and we only desire to serve each other.

      But inspite of all efforts and good intentions, still something bad creeps in and then we feel sad. Please do not feel sad about any mistakes. This happened to me. I have written posts and I made tons of errors, often posting up something that caused trouble. Now I am more careful. This happened even to other Vaisnavas. There was this article on Vamsidasa Babaji sometime back that claimed he was Gauranga nagari or something. Since it came at the end, no one noticed it until later and then when we it was removed. The source of the article was also a well known devotee, but only after reading it a few times the error was noticed. The same thing was true for the BBT. Intially they made many editing fumbles in publishing Prabhupada's books as they had to put the tape recordings into paper without knowledge of Sanskirt or Bengali and in the case of Chaitanya Charitamrta they had to get 11 volumes ready in just 4 months, often working without sleep. Now to properly go through everything page by page and proof read it and correct everything is something that has been going on for 30 years because of the sheer amount of Prabhupada's writings. It happens.....

     A few tips before posting : 1) If we see something on the web that looks good, we must spend sometime going through the article before we put it up here. Never mind if it takes a few days, but do not hurry. First thing is to understand an article or a post properly before putting it up, or else we may not understand why others are responding negatively.

     2) Please preview your posts before putting them up, that way you'll know how it looks like. This may considerably increase your writing time, so please do it offline before coming up here. Some of my own writings have taken 4-5 hours of work before putting them up, even then there are problems.

     3) In making audio or video posts a good idea would be to write down what we want to say with a few hints here and there and refer to that while recording. Not everyone is a born speaker. I am a terrible speaker for one thing and I had to learn this point in my first attempt at making a video. I ended up reading the prayers as I kept forgetting the lines.

Hope that helps,
Your servant,
Srinath

Nityananda! Gauranga! Hare Krishna!

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