About informing others of the list guidelines [was: karl-desktop]

[Kristian Rink]

Am Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:36:21 +0200
schrieb Ari Torhamo <ari.torhamo at saunalahti.fi>:

> People generally seem to appreciate to be able to learn efficient ways
> to work together. I myself am grateful for the lessons I have received
> here for effective communication. When I came to this list, I always
> top posted, wrote uninformative subject lines for my messages, was
> unspecific when I described a problem, I may have even... ehem... sent
> in an HTML message or two, and so on :-) I thank those who took the
> time to tell me a better way. 

You're right. :)

Discussions like this whole "karl-desktop" thread are seriously
disturbing to me, also because, well, there has been more than one like
these threads around here just recently where, obviously started by
someone who posted a message with a pointless subject or a message
including HTML or a message hijacking another thread, people end up in
infinite discussions about formalities, leaving aside the only thing
that actually should be taken care of first: helping the person that
asked a question, no matter how "formally bad" this question has been
expressed.

Seeing this is sad on an Ubuntu list as indeed this isn't new - it's
been the same way on newsgroups and other mailing list for ages -
chances to get help sending an HTML-formatted mail to debian-user is
rather low. Too bad if you're using an ISP end-user webmailer that
doesn't allow for sending anything else. I like the idea of netiquette,
and I think there are good reasons why to kindly ask people to (not) do
some things. But maybe we should focus on what things mainly are about
- helping others. So, perhaps, it would be better to ignore questions
we can't answer and provide "formal hints" as a small note ("by the
way: ...") _after_ providing substantials hints to a question asked by
some user on that list? This would hopefully keep endless "formal"
discussions from happening...

Just my €0.02 on that.
Cheers,
Kristian

-- 
Kristian Rink * http://zimmer428.net * http://flickr.com/photos/z428/
jab: kawazu at jabber.ccc.de * icq: 48874445 * fon: ++49 176 2447 2771
"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
is the beginning of a new reality." (Hundertwasser)