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Doesn’t work that way, Ray.  It won’t let you post to a points group if you don’t have enough.  Period.  If you do have enough (even exactly the right amount), it pops up and asks you if you want to deduct.  You choose to post on not.  Period.  It also doesn’t “swallow” your points in that situation.

Okay, good to see that one’s successfully solved.  Now, to stay obliquely on topic—I was reading an article recently in the New England Journal of Medicine about this newly identified neurological disorder called CDP (Chronic Debilitating Pedantry).  They’re treating it with electro-shock therapy and an experimental cocktail concocted from Absolut, clomipramine, and ground-up red Skittles.  It’s shown promise so far, and is going into the final phase of clinical trials.  They are looking for volunteers.  Know anyone overly punctilious who’d be interested in being a guinea pig?

I love you, man ...

One cannot “allege” with a question.

allege
—verb
to declare with positiveness; affirm; assert: to allege a fact.

jest
—noun
a joke or witty remark; witticism.
a bantering remark; a piece of good-natured ridicule

Over 90%  of novels started on this website don’t get finished—either because the member doesn’t hang around or the writer peters out.  Therefore, unless you are critiquing someone who has a track record of carrying through on their manuscripts (which is probably about a dozen or less people), you can almost guarantee the novel won’t be finished anyway.  With that in mind, expecting to review or be reviewed from beginning to end is not practical most of the time.  We should all be thankful for anyone who reviews our work and offers their help, regardless if it’s a one-time drop in or a dedicated beta reader.

A period works fine, but if you like a colon, then put a colon and move on or you’ll never get finished.

Of course.

Actually, I didn’t draw a conclusion (nor opine).  I put Dirk’s question in a different light and posed my own question to give him another way to think about it.  I don’t really have an opinion.  It’s Dirk’s sentence, and if he likes a pause there, he should put it there.  He’s the conductor.

“Punctuation tells the reader how to hear your writing. That’s what it’s for.”
Ursula K. Le Guin

“Freight the sentence”? “Global structure”? “Structural break in the grammar flow”? “Decode its structure”? Lordy, I don’t even know what all that hooey means.  I just write and tell my readers how to read it with my punctuation.  Guess I best whip out my grammar primer and learn about that “global structure” stuff before I embarrass myself ...

I sent a reply to your other query, but since you mentioned the WGF series, I quite like it.  “Revision and Self-Editing” and “Dialogue” are very good.  If you subscribe to the RSS feed or email updates from Writer’s Digest, they frequently have books on sale for $4.99, and the WGF series is typically included.

Jesus ...

I’ll say.

I gave up television cold turkey in 1997.  I highly recommend total abstinence. If you do that, you can spend all those wasted hours doing something worthwhile ... like, maybe ... I dunno ... writing and reading?