Netiquette Primer, please read! (was: Re: European law)

From: Rodolfo J. Paiz (rpaiz_at_simpaticus.com)
Date: 06/07/04

  • Next message: Naoki: "Re: X logout = box freeze" 
    Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2004 23:22:10 -0600
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    At 00:20 6/6/2004, Fons van der Beek wrote:
    >when replying a mail on a mailing list, reply on top of the previous
    >message, so when reading
    >one can see newest posts first.........tis saves a lot of time.

    Good Lord, no! In particular, not again!

    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.

    Cheers, 

    -- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz@simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com
-- 
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@redhat.com
To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
  • Next message: Naoki: "Re: X logout = box freeze"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: Bottom posting
      ... Is their any particular reason for bottom posting (please excuse my ... Q. Is there any good reason for top posting? ... most mailing lists are somewhat ...
      (comp.lang.ruby)
    • Re: WLAN, WEP, if_ndis on -CURRENT
      ... Sam Leffler wrote: ... There is no reason to cc me directly; I read the mailing lists. ... Go to the bottom of: ...
      (freebsd-current)
    • Re: Pricing ACL
      ... >> yet you seem never to have used our support. ... Any community that a vendor establishes is not a user's community, ... > 2) when I had sent a subscription request to the mailing list, ... > - Most discussions on vendor mailing lists are fostered by immediate ...
      (comp.lang.lisp)
    • Note on TRIMMING, was: Why do people detest top posting so much?
      ... that's true ONLY if the person who bottom posted did not trim as much ... the mailing list archives. ... Posting in a way that makes everybody ... But many people follow many mailing lists at the same ...
      (Ubuntu)
    • [Full-Disclosure] openssl exploit code
      ... prevent full disclosure lists from informing the community. ... servers will stay unpatched until an exploit is published. ... would be to move our mailing lists and servers to a country with more lax ... > your PRIVATE code to the public was in the best interests of the ...
      (Full-Disclosure)