On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 12:00:51PM -0500, Keith G. Murphy wrote:
> will trillich wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 04:56:44PM +0200, Joost Kooij wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 09:57:42AM -0400, Walter Tautz wrote:
> > > >
> >
> > i must say, that was the best laugh i've had in a looong time.
> >
> > (anybody have email brakage from this? my mutt had no
> > troubles at all...)
> >
> Frankly, I thought it was abusive. The original post seemed appropriate
> to me. The subject line said it all, keeping you from reading the post
> if you weren't interested.
>
> And what would you need to add to the body, given the subject?
when looking at a list of emails, you can tell the difference
between each by the terse synopsis we call "subject line".
when looking AT the body of the message, we expect to see an
actual message.
if it takes a quick cut & paste, so be it.
the idea here is to get answers to your questions, right? so it
behooves us to facilitate the lives of the people we're pointing
our questions at: a subject gives us the gist of what the asker
is after, and the message itself will clinch or spoil the deal
(once the subject line gets us to 'bite', to borrow a term from
fishing).
also, if we can tell the asker is impatient and lazy, then we
-- being human beings -- tend to respond in kind. until one of us
decides to educate the lazy poster, that is.
this is all corollary to number two, below (see .sig).
--
we encourage folks to wrap their lines so that our text readers
don't hiccup every other line when someone forwards something.
we ask that people use the standard ">" quoting prefix so we can
identify, at a glance, which iteration of threaded quote we're
looking at, so we can track who said what.
we behoove posters to "postfix" their answers so that the
responses follow the queries, to establish reasonable context.
similarly, we ask people to use the subject line to grab our
attention (so their message stand out in a list and be noticed)
and use the message body to explain what they want us to spend
our time on.
yes, joost went overboard, but occasionally a /little/ irony
isn't enough to get the job done. the only harm done would be if
walter decided debian wasn't worth exploring because he got
spanked for bad manners. (added benefit would be if it crashed
some closed-platform emailers.)
--
DEBIAN NEWBIE TIP #63 from Will Trillich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
:
What's the best way to GET RESPONSES ON DEBIAN-USER? There are
several things to keep in mind:
1) Debians are all volunteers because they enjoy what they
do; they don't owe you diddly (and you'll be one of us
when you start getting involved): ASK, and ye shall
recieve; DEMAND, and ye shall be rebuffed
2) Provide evidence showing that you did put effort into
finding a solution to your problem (at least demonstrate
that you've seen the manual)
3) Be known to offer pointers and assistance to others
4) Give enough information so that someone else can figure
out what you're after; and make it legible
5) Enjoy yourself and have fun -- it'll come across, and we
enjoy people who enjoy life; a petulant whiner seldom
gets any useful pointers other than "Out, miscreant!"
Also see http://newbieDoc.sourceForge.net/ ...
