5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
11 1.2 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
12 1.3 Subscription Required
13 1.4 Moderation of new posters
18 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
20 2.5 HTML is not for mails
23 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
25 ==============================================================================
31 Netiquette is a common name for how to behave on the internet. Of course, in
32 each particular group and subculture there will be differences in what is
33 acceptable and what is considered good manners.
35 This document outlines what we in the cURL project considers to be good
36 etiquette, and primarily this focus on how to behave on and how to use our
39 1.2 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
41 Many people send one question to one person. One person gets many mails, and
42 there is only one person who can give you a reply. The question may be
43 something that other people are also wanting to ask. These other people have
44 no way to read the reply, but to ask the one person the question. The one
45 person consequently gets overloaded with mail.
47 If you really want to contact an individual and perhaps pay for his or her's
48 services, by all means go ahead, but if it's just another curl question,
49 take it to a suitable list instead.
51 1.3 Subscription Required
53 All curl mailing lists require that you are subscribed to allow a mail to go
54 through to all the subscribers.
56 If you post without being subscribed (or from a different mail address than
57 the one you are subscribed with), your mail will simply be silently
58 discarded. You have to subscribe first, then post.
60 The reason for this unfortunate and strict subscription policy is of course
61 to stop spam from pestering the lists.
63 1.4 Moderation of new posters
65 Several of the curl mailing lists automatically make all posts from new
66 subscribers require moderation. This means that after you've subscribed and
67 send your first mail to a list, that mail will not be let through to the
68 list until a mailing list administrator has verified that it is OK and
69 permits it to get posted.
71 Once a first post has been made that proves the sender is actually talking
72 about curl-related subjects, the moderation "flag" will be switched off and
73 future posts will go through without being moderated.
75 The reason for this moderation policy is that we do suffer from spammers who
76 actually subscribe and send spam to our lists.
83 Please do not reply to an existing message as a short-cut to post a message
86 Many mail programs and web archivers use information within mails to keep
87 them together as "threads", as collections of posts that discuss a certain
88 subject. If you don't intend to reply on the same or similar subject, don't
89 just hit reply on an existing mail and change subject, create a new mail.
93 When replying to a message from the list, make sure that you do "group
94 reply" or "reply to all", and not just reply to the author of the single
97 We're actively discouraging replying back to the single person by setting
98 the Reply-To: field in outgoing mails back to the mailing list address,
99 making it harder for people to mail the author only by mistake.
101 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
103 Please use a subject of the mail that makes sense and that is related to the
104 contents of your mail. It makes it a lot easier to find your mail afterwards
105 and it makes it easier to track mail threads and topics.
109 If you reply to a message, don't use top-posting. Top-posting is when you
110 write the new text at the top of a mail and you insert the previous quoted
111 mail conversation below. It forces users to read the mail in a backwards
112 order to properly understand it.
114 This is why top posting is so bad:
116 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read
118 Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
120 Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
122 Apart from the screwed up read order (especially when mixed together in a
123 thread when some responds doing the mandaded bottom-posting style), it also
124 makes it impossible to quote only parts of the original mail.
126 When you reply to a mail. You let the mail client insert the previous mail
127 quoted. Then you put the cursor on the first line of the mail and you move
128 down through the mail, deleting all parts of the quotes that don't add
129 context for your comments. When you want to add a comment you do so, inline,
130 right after the quotes that relate to your comment. Then you continue
133 When most of the quotes have been removed and you've added your own words,
136 2.5 HTML is not for mails
138 Please switch off those HTML encoded messages. You can mail all those funny
139 mails to your friends. We speak plain text mails.
143 Quote as little as possible. Just enough to provide the context you cannot
144 leave out. A lengthy description can be found here:
146 http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
150 We allow subscribers to subscribe to the "digest" version of the mailing
151 lists. A digest is a collection of mails lumped together in one single mail.
153 Should you decide to reply to a mail sent out as a digest, there are two
154 things you MUST consider if you really really cannot subscribe normally
157 Cut off all mails and chatter that is not related to the mail you want to
160 Change the subject name to something sensible and related to the subject,
161 preferably even the actual subject of the single mail you wanted to reply to
163 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
165 Many people mail questions to the list, people spend some of their time and
166 make an effort in providing good answers to these questions.
168 If you are the one who asks, please consider responding once more in case
169 one of the hints was what solved your problems. The guys who write answers
170 feel good to know that they provided a good answer and that you fixed the
171 problem. Far too often, the person who asked the question is never heard of
172 again, and we never get to know if he/she is gone because the problem was
173 solved or perhaps because the problem was unsolvable!
175 Getting the solution posted also helps other users that experience the same
176 problem(s). They get to see (possibly in the web archives) that the
177 suggested fixes actually has helped at least one person.