[Wolves] Keep calm the waters lovley

[Peter Cannon]

Hi All

A guy on another LUG posted this I thought maybe it could be used in some way 
for new members.

Thoughts, bottles, bricks and flames in the usual way!

(Please keep in mind that newsgroups and mailing lists have been around 
since at least 1989 (the earliest I can remember them) and surely long 
before then. Netiquette has evolved the way it has for a reason, and that 
reason is simply that the generally-accepted way of doing things is what 
works best for the largest amount of people. In this as in any human 
endeavor, entering a community suggests that you take some time to study, 
learn, and analyze that community's customs to see the reasons why those 
customs exist. Simply attempting to reinvent the wheel every time you enter 
a new community wastes an enormous amount of your effort and time, and 
usually leads to wrong conclusions anyway.

It also forces the rest of us to keep explaining things again, and again, 
and again. Which honestly, does get very frustrating. So here's a basic 
explanation:

In one-to-one conversation, you most likely remember the content of the 
entire conversation. You may want to keep old text around for reference, 
but it's not really necessary and neither you nor the other person are 
likely to get confused by seeing something out of order. So top-posting or 
bottom-posting are pretty much irrelevant, and people often leave the 
entire conversation stuck at the bottom of each message, repeated every 
time and simply adding to the length of the overall post as they reply. In 
essence, the entire conversation is contained in every message. While this 
is incredibly wasteful of bandwidth, it's really not very important since 
it's only you and your friend... two people.

*NONE* of that is true on mailing lists and newsgroups. These are 
"one-to-many" environments where everything you write is going to copied 
4,000 times and sent to each subscriber. And many of those 4,000 are 
carrying on additional conversations that have nothing to do with yours, in 
effect talking at the same time. So two major changes need to be made in 
the way you post messages in these one-to-many environments:

         1. Please trim your posts! Delete as much of the previous message 
or messages as you can, leaving only the minimum necessary for others to 
understand what you are discussing and to which message you are responding. 
If you think your point can be made well without quoting anything from the 
previous message, great... don't quote anything at all. Leave whatever you 
need to establish context and maintain continuity, but *please* do not 
leave the entire previous message and three list message footers out of 
laziness or carelessness. It will hurt your reputation as well as the 
chances that people read your posts.

         2. Please keep things in order! This means *chronological* order. 
Since many of us are following 15 to 50 conversations simultaneously at any 
given time, we get instantly and thoroughly confused when things are out of 
order. This is turn leads to people not understanding your problem, then 
throwing up their hands in despair. The end result? You get no help! So 
please... keep things in order. Oldest text at the top, newest text at the 
bottom. Why? We read (in English) from left to right and from top to 
bottom, so your messages get read from top to bottom and NOT (not!) from 
bottom to top.

Trim your posts, keep things in chronological order. Two of the most basic 
and long-term rules of online communities. No one forces you to follow 
them, but I can promise you (based again on the 15 years I've been on this 
kind of community) that your reputation will be positively or negatively 
affected by how you write, and so will the quality of help you get when you 
ask a question. Your writing is how you present yourself to the community.

And remember that even if *you* prefer to disagree and prefer top-posting, 
that the rest of this community has agreed through long tradition and 
constant preference, to continue bottom-posting as the norm. Courtesy to 
your peers is also necessary if, in the long term, you expect to continue 
to be a member of the community and be well-regarded.

Hopefully this short explanation is useful to someone.)

-- 

Regards

Peter Cannon

peter at cannon-linux.freeserve.co.uk

"And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain
he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer"