Disclaimer: Any CAPITALS or red that might be used in this post are for discussion purposes and should not be considered as shouting or impersonating of staff, they are merely provided as examples.
It's funny how the "standard" has evolved. In the old days, computers were limited to caps only. Teletype, keypunch, and terminal limitations. Then mixed case came along, but only in the academic and research environments. Only a couple of operating systems even supported mixed case. Back then there weren't "forums," just "bulletin boards" and mailing list servers. People used to deride anyone using mixed case as "ivory tower" types. After a few years, especially as personal computers became popular, mixed case became an acceptable norm. But there was no way to emphasize portions of text. If you wanted to highlight a word or phrase, you had to use CAPS, or one of only a few *special characters* that were supported.
Even the oldest typewriters supported underlining and bold, just by backspacing and retyping or adding underscores. But computers didn't.
Now, years later, you can use alternative fonts and effects provided right on the forums themselves. This includes underlining, bold, italics, larger and smaller fonts, colors, and more. The funniest part is that a lot of us old timers still use caps for highlighting out of habit. It's much *easier* to use caps or a symbol on the keyboard to add emphasis. You have to screw around a lot to use some of the other options, or know special key combinations.
And in many modern systems, caps are still used a lot. Most of the people I know that text don't use correct case at all, everything is lower case. They use caps just for emphasis, and caps are the only emphasis they use. They often consider special characters *bad* or /inappropriate/ and even _laughable_ or @offensive. Flipping between text messaging and forums just adds to the excitement.
By the way, Brutal, I had read the site rules to see what exactly they say, a while back when you commented on it. It reads:
"3. Please do not post threads text in all CAPITALS since this is considered to be shouting and is not necessary."
It's not 100% clear if this means just a word, or an entire post. I have tried not to do it as much as I normally do, so as not to offend the sensitive. (Even though half of America is offended by everything.) I may forget on occasion, but I think I usually catch myself here. If I do forget, apologies in advance. I don't ever consider myself shouting in public forums.
It also reserves red as a color for staff only, in another rule. Just feedback to the site admins: a fair percentage of the male population is red-green or more fully colorblind. Use of red text is not particularly useful in emphasizing stuff. You may want to avoid it if you're trying to get everyone to understand your emphasis.
It would be nice to have easier-to-use methods of highlight text in the forums. At the same time, any kind of highlighting might eventually be taken as "shouting" by someone. What would the site staff and admins like to see used?