Please Remember Netiquette <snip>

Charles Mauch cmauch at taclug.org
Thu Aug 11 09:57:57 UTC 2005


Greetings from Tacoma, WA, USA, Earth, Sol, Milky Way, Verse, Arjan!
On Thursday, August 11, in the 2005th year of our Lord, you wrote:

> Especially in a newbie-friendly list like this, we cannot and should 
> not expect people to really follow these guidelines. Nor should we 
> care too much, anyway.

My thinking is that even in a newbie-friendly list, proper netiquette is a
good thing to promote (within reason).

> Although Netiquette is nice and fun and all, I honestly do not care 
> about the few wasted bits of an untrimmed quote, top-posting or 
> whatever small netiquette rules they thought about when composing 
> these guidelines. Although I'm a guy who usually demands good form and 
> design, in such cases as mailinglists, content is way more important 
> than whatever style it has been written in.

I have about 10 vim macros that are run on emails posted to mailing lists,
mostly due to some of the non-technical yahoogroups list I subscribe to.  I
don't point out their faux pas mostly because it wouldn't be appreciated.
Some people aren't interested in learning, so your required to adapt.

That said, when someone top-posts or formats their email into lines of 120
characters (or more), I generally move on and ignore the message.  If
someone is asking for help, and won't take the time to make their text
presentable it, it doesn't say much about what might be contained in it.

So I'd argue that yes, it is important.

Any GNU/Linux centric list tends to be frequented by early adopter and
technical types.  I have much less of a problem pointing abuses of
netiquette in these kinds of forums, mostly because they might be receptive
to such a message.

> Anyway, there was a big discussion about this not too long ago (two 
> months?) on this list, with basically the same conclusion. Netiquette 
> is nice, but not -that- important :-).

Here are some guidelines I try and follow (but sometimes ignore)

 [1] "Netiquette Guidelines" (Intel Corp., '95) RFC 1855
     http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
     (Hakim's original post referenced this)

 [2] "The Text/Plain Format Parameter" (R. Gellens, '99) RFC 2646
     http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt

 [3] Dirk Nimmich's more general overview (which is not as exhaustive
     however as far as quoting related aspects are concerned)
     http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

-- 
Take it easy, [cmauch at taclug.org]

Charles Mauch, FSF Apologist, Debian/Ubuntu/Gentoo user, etc.
Every message PGP or S/MIME signed to verify authenticity.
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Playing "Empty Handed" by Michelle Branch (Hotel Paper)
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