Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 08:01:52 +1100 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: Capriotti <capriotti@geocities.com> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Organizational issue for this list Message-ID: <19980323080152.35081@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19980323042732.00ad1900@pop.mpc.com.br>; from Capriotti on Mon, Mar 23, 1998 at 04:28:21AM -0300 References: <3.0.32.19980323042732.00ad1900@pop.mpc.com.br>
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OK, I'm going to argue against you here because there's nobody else around to do it, and because there are a few more things to consider. On Mon, Mar 23, 1998 at 04:28:21AM -0300, Capriotti wrote: > Ok, ppl: I have a suggestion to our - and possibly all other - list: > > It's out of our hands, so I belive it needs to be voted, aproved and then > submited to the responsible for majordomo. Let's assume for a minute that it would be changed if everyone wanted it. Everyone is a lot of people. The change would have to be wanted by the participants on all of the FreeBSD mailing lists. Here they are: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/handbook317.html Count them! (and add one for newbies, it's coming). Most of them have a lot more users than our list, as you'll realise if you've ever subscribed to freebsd-questions. Eventually we'll stop being newbies and have more to contribute to the other lists. There are a lot of requirements for people who post to the FreeBSD lists and you might as well get used to them here, where I'm not going to jump down anyone's throat while they're learning. See below for examples. > Whe I am writting to a list, and receiving email from a list, all the > replies that I write - as far as I concern - should go to the list. OK, then set your software up so that it does that, or learn how to make it do that (it might be called group-reply, reply-to-all, list-reply). Learn to work with the To: and Cc: headers. You'll have to do that anyway if you want to participate elsewhere. If your software won't let you do these things then it probably does a lot of other things wrong to. Use something better (I like mutt). > It seems to be common sense to me. But things like what happened - I have > sent a reply to Sue, instead of to the list - can cause us some wanste of > time in the best case. Ah, is that what happened :-) I've made mistakes like that too, BIG ones, and not always because I wasn't used to the headers. A few times the headers were to blame though. I was on one of those lists where they do put the list address in the reply-to and didn't realise. I replied to someone on the list saying all sorts of personal things, and hit r for a normal reply to the person sending the email. Wasn't I surprised when I got angry answers from everywhere! > More than that, sometimes, the best answer to a problem is lost because > someone forgot to CC the list on that particular reply ! Judging by the size of my personal mail box, I suspect that does happen a lot with this list :-) But some people have written to me because they are too shy to post to the list. I can't always tell what the reason was, and I don't have the right to repost private mail to the list. Yes it is a shame sometimes. It'll take more than a few days to get used to how it works. Meanwhile, if you accidentally send it privately, send it again straight away, but to the list. > Note that the "[freebsd]" tag added to the subject line makes it easier to > filter you tons of email in the end of the semester/year/whatever time > period you use to clean up your computer. > > a good tag for our group could be [FBSD-newbie]. I run another mailing list where we do that and it works very well. Everyone on that list uses different operating systems and most of them can't find decent mail software written for them, so they need all the help they can get. Under FreeBSD we have lots of software that does the work for us. Also, the majority of people who use FreeBSD have been doing these things for a very long time and they have developed certain habits and expectations. If you don't conform to the common standards and conventions I'm afraid you're not going to be accepted by FreeBSD users on the other lists. They'll find your mail too hard to deal with and ignore it when there's 200 another well written emails to deal with. Some of the things that we do here would make us the laughing stock on any list used by professionals. For example, some people don't reply as if it's an email but treat it like a letter. They type everything they want to say all by itself at the top, and then quote the whole of the original message below. When I read it I have to read it backwards to get any meaning. When I reply, it's a nightmare to make sense of it so usually I don't bother to reply. Another problem is text that doesn't line wrap when it gets to about 70-75 characters long. I end up seeing the first 80 characters of each paragraph! How am I going to reply to that? If I'm really busy and 50 people are demanding my urgent attention, who do you think is going to have to wait? A few times, I can handle it. If it keeps happening it can drive me crazy like a dripping tap. I'm ready for anything here in -newbies, but you won't get away with any of these things elsewhere. So I guess I'm saying think of these as all part of a learning process where there's a lot of new conventions and habits to change, and take advantage of our patient environment to start making those changes now, while you can. http://www.lemis.com/email.html has a lot more information about this. Highly recommended. -- Regards, -*Sue*- find / -name "*.conf" |more To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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