Brett Parker wrote:
On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 10:23:58AM +0100, Al wrote:
Laurie, Obviously I'm one of the lurker types that never attends meetings, but what was wrong with the C.N.Ross questions? Seemed reasonable to me and you appeared to drop on him/her from a great height, for no real reason...or did I miss something.
I have a hunch that Laurie was complaining about the fact that the message contained the entire text of a digest, and although that didn't bother me (mainly cos I'm sitting in the middle of an office with a nice sminty net connection, its a bit of a waste of bandwidth for the modem users out there.
Am I right Laurie?
Anyways. Back to werk.
Brett
Yep, partially. When one considers the traffic on the net, gratuitous waste of bandwith affects us all, ultimately, rarely more so than in newsgroups and mailing lists.
To Al, et al (arfarf!)
The nub is that a constant problem with the rush to join the net, is the number of new users who don't understand the netiquette, or the reasons for it. Worse are those who don't care and refuse to moderate their behaviour, but we don't have those in here, thankfully.
The "rules" for posting have evolved as a consequence of the the difficulties in communicating electronically, and encompass all sort of issues. Bandwidth, PC performance, character sets, the lack of emotion in written text, typographical convention and so on. They evolved because they needed to, and even if some issues such as bandwidth seem less relevant today, when examined in any depth, they are just as relevant as ever. When a newbie in a group like this uses his outlook or netscape client in default mode (which flies in the face of convention) then he or she needs to be advised of the rules, and invited to modify his or her behaviour. We in here can be nice and friendly, others are very much less so. Trust me on that.
So, the "rules" relevant in this instance (and Al's "guilty" of two of these):
Never post in HTML Never post binaries to a newsgroup Never have a sig more than 5 lines long Never quote a sig Never quote more of the text you're answering than neccessary Always use [SNIP] if the quote deletion alters the context Always put your reply AFTER the quotes never before Always be polite Always check for grammar and typos If asking a question, give full info.
There are loads more, but these are the relevant ones.
A personal one I have, is to remember that dejanews archives newsgropups, and that thousands use it extensively for technical queries. Therefore, in a technical forum, I try to use topic text and question-framing with later searching and retrieval in mind. 'Course, that's irrelevant in a mailing list.
Cheers, Laurie.