Forum comment

This category covers posts and comments that are recoverable (i.e., open access). (Posts that are protected by privacy settings should be treated as personal communications; see Example in Personal communication.

In-text citations

Paraphrasing

GeekBoy (2008) reports that  …

Direct quote

Place direct quotes between single quotation marks ' ' and provide the paragraph number.

'Unfair criticism of Twitter's search function has been reported over the past few days …' (GeekBoy 2008,  para. 1).

Reference list

Template

Author [screen name], Year, ‘Title’ form, viewed date, URL

Example

GeekBoy 2008, ‘Re: Who’s messing with Twitter search?’, online forum comment, 9 October, viewed 24 September 2011,  http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/09

Notes on style

• Give real name of poster. Add screen name (if one) in square brackets, or alone if real unknown.
• Give year after name. Add date of post after the title and form.
• Give post/comment/tweet as title (with single quote marks, no italics). Add form (e.g., tweet; facebook post; photograph, etc.) after title. (Use ‘twitter page’ or ‘facebook page’ if using someone’s entire feed/timeline as a source.)
• Give full URL of item. If item is archived, give archived version URL (click post’s date stamp). Retrieval date: Not needed for items with a specific associated date (e.g., individual tweets, posts, etc.), but is needed for whole feeds/pages because content will change.