Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 18:28:37 -0600 From: Andrew Hesford <ajh3@chmod.ath.cx> To: FreeBSD-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Mailing List Suggestions Message-ID: <20010326182837.B4218@cec.wustl.edu>
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Hello, I've been following freebsd-questions for a few weeks now. I have begun to notice certain recurring message formats. It occurs to me that -questions might be a bit cleaner and easier to follow if we all follow a few guidelines: 1. Naturally, make sure your message looks okay in your own email client before you send it. 2. When replying to posts, please type your response BEFORE the included original message. This allows people who have followed the thread from its inception to not have to hunt through text he's already seen. 3. When replying to posts, ALWAYS include relevant portions of the message you are replying to. This makes it easy for those of us who haven't seen the thread before, or have forgotten the contents of an old thread, to quickly recall what questions are being answered. 4. In reply text, trim it up. Remove signatures, and especially remove the instructions on unsubscribing from freebsd-questions. That message appears on every post; we don't need to see it five times. Also, remove excess whitespace and comments; background info that isn't relevant to the question (but instead only helps elaborate a story) should be removed from reply text. Most importantly, make sure all the text you include is marked as reply text, since in some mail readers (e.g., mutt) this is color-sensitive. Alternating green and white lines are confusing and hard to read. 5. Don't keep the entire thread contained in reply text. This may be subjective, but I say no more than relevant portions from the past two messages should be included in your message. 6. This is probably the only unanimously supported suggestion in here: NO HTML! Being a FreeBSD-related mailing list, the vast majority of us probably use mutt or pine, which won't handle HTML without some tweaking. Plain text conveys email thoughts just as well as HTML, and it avoids clutter for those who haven't configured their mail readers. 7. I imagine this will be the point to generate the most disagreement, but please don't have the contents of long files in the message body. If long files (e.g., kernel configs) are attached rather than pasted in, people who aren't interested don't have to read the files. Furthermore, if there are changes that can be made to files, readers can easily save the attachment, edit it, and send it back to the original poster. Naturally, I follow all these guidelines, because I created them. :) However, I know my posting habits are not perfect in the eyes of others, and would be interested in hearing what you all think about these rules. Perhaps we can generate a good compromise, and have majordomo send out the guidelines to all new subscribers? -- Andrew Hesford ajh3@chmod.ath.cx To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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