[colorforth] General netiquette

[postmaster <postmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please follow all of these guidelines to ensure that the list members can read 
your message.  It is worth applying these to your other mails as well.  
Netiquette was established many years ago for many good reasons.  
Understanding them will ensure a more pleasant mailing list and newsgroup 
experience as you traverse the Internet.


If your message is more difficult to read than it needs to be, many list 
members will simply delete it.

Make sure that your MUA is configured to send your message as plain-text, not 
HTML, multipart/alternative, quoted-printable (sometimes called 
quoted-unreadable for good reason), base64, or some other encoding.  HTML 
mail is rejected.

If you don't know how to configure your MUA to not send HTML in messages,

http://www.expita.com/nomime.html has instructions for configuring many common 
MUAs.

Don't type your message in all-caps; it makes you appear to be shouting, and 
is considered rude.

Include relevant information in the body of your message.  Don't assume that 
putting it in the Subject: header field is sufficient.  Don't include MIME 
attachments.

Configure your MUA to wrap lines at 72 characters or so; long lines make for 
unreadable messages in some clients.  Also make sure that your MUA doesn't 
automatically send useless attachments (vcards and such) with every message; 
it's a waste of bandwidth.  Limit your signatures to Three lines.

If you need to supply a large amount of information to explain your problem 
clearly (i.e., you want the list to see several hundred lines of log 
entries), put the information on a website and include the URL in your 
message instead of sending it as an attachment.

Make sure your message is in clear, concise, and correct English.  If English 
is not your first language, that's fine.  The members of the list will do 
their best to understand your message.  However, if your message is unclear 
simply because you cannot be bothered to ensure that it is free of gross 
spelling or grammatical errors, it may be ignored completely.  To be more 
explicit: do not use any of the following in your message:

Lanugages other than English

Abbreviations - Use the formal full spelling in the first usage, if you must 
abbreviate

Misspellings (including "leet"-speak and other abominations of English)

Lack of punctuation or capitalization

Incorrect punctuation or capitalization

If you post a followup message (replying to someone else's request for 
clarification or additional information, or answering specific questions), 
please do so sensibly:

Quote only what is necessary. Trim everything else.

Attribute quotes properly.

 Post new material underneath older material. Don't top-post!

 This bears repeating:

 Do not top-post in your replies to the mailing list!
 Do not top-post in your replies to the mailing list! 
 Do not top-post in your replies to the mailing list!
 
Top-posting makes the list archives un-readable.  Top-posting to a mailing 
list is like dumping excrement in our homes; if you do it, you'll likely not 
be happy with the response. 
Some MUAs, such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express, encourage 
top-posting by their default configuration, or even make it needlessly 
difficult to quote correctly.  If you use one of these broken MUAs and must 
continue to use it, the following free add-ons can apparently fix them for 
you:

 Outlook Express: http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/ 
 Outlook: http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
 

If you don't know what top-posting is, or don't already understand common 
Usenet and mailing list etiquette, please read the following documents which 
explain proper quoting style:

http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/http/quote.html
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7ewijnands/nnq/nquote.html
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g.mccaughan/g/remarks/uquote.html

Postmaster   -   Chaos Solutions L.C.


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