Forum Etiquette

Forum Etiquette

Ground Rules
There are a few ground rules for participation in forums. Please respect these rules, and each other.

Be civil.
No personal attacks. If you feel the need to flame someone, please do it in private e-mail. Do not feel compelled to defend your honor in public.

Stay on topic.
These are generally high-traffic groups, so please pay attention to the topic of your messages, and check that it still relates to the charter of the forum to which you are posting.

No crossposting.
It is almost never appropriate to send the same message to two mailing lists or newsgroups. Please don't do it. Or, if you must, make sure you set the Followup-To and Reply-To fields to ensure that replies go only to one, not to both.

Ignore spammers.
Spam is a blight upon the face of the net. Nobody likes it. However, it is hard to avoid. If you feel the need to flame the spammer, do not CC the list. Complaining about spam in public increases noise, but not signal. It may make you feel better, but it doesn't help. (For info on fighting spam effectively, check out spam.abuse.net.)

No large attachments.
Do not send binary attachments, including screen shots, and especially including screen shots of textual dialog boxes. Many people read these messages through slow network connections; try to be respectful of them. If you have a large file that you would like to distribute, put it on a Web page and announce the URL instead of attaching it.

Trim your follow-ups.
Do not quote the entire content of the message to which you are replying. Include only as much as is necessary for context. Remember that if someone wants to read the original message, they can; it is easily accessible. A good rule of thumb is, don't include more quoted text than new text.

There is always a need for some trimming - either a salutation, a signature, some blank lines or whatever. If you are doing no trimming whatsoever of the quoted text, then you aren't trimming enough.

Top-posting vs bottom-posting.
Some people like to put reply after the quoted text, some like it the other way around, and still some prefer interspersed style. Debates about which posting style is better have led to many flame wars in the forums. To keep forum discussion friendly, please do interspersion with trimming (see above for trimming rules). For a simple reply, this is equivalent bottom-posting. So, remove extraneous material, and place your comments in logical order, after the text you are commenting upon. The only exceptions are the accessibility forums, which are top-posting.

Post HTML at your own risk.
Keep in mind that not everyone uses mail or news readers that can easily display HTML messages. Consequently, you will reach a larger audience if you post in plain-text. Many people simply ignore HTML messages, because it takes a nontrivial amount of effort to read them.


Identify your subject matter.
Not everyone has time reading all forum postings. To ensure that your message reach the right people at timely manner, identify your subject matter clearly in the subject line.