GEN-BENELUX-L Archives

From:
Subject: [FAQ] Basic Newsgroup & Mailing List Netiquette
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 101 07:01:01 -0500 (CDT)

Summary: This posting contains a copy of a regular information posting
on basic newsgroup and mailing list netiquette.

Posting-Frequency: 1st of the month
Last-Modified: 1999/07/05
URL: http://www.woodgate.org/FAQs/netiquette.html

Basic newsgroup and mailing list "Netiquette"

Summary

This is a regular posting which outlines the basic newsgroup and mailing
list "Netiquette" which should be followed by anyone who wishes to post to
the soc.genealogy.* hierarchy of newsgroups and mailing lists.

This document is part of a regular series of postings which are sent to all
appropriate groups and mailing lists. This particular document is posted on
the first of every month.

The latest version of this document is available from the following
locations

* Via the WWW at the URL http://www.woodgate.org/FAQs/netiquette.html
* Via anonymous FTP from ftp://ftp.woodgate.org/FAQs/netiquette.txt

If you have any comments or additions, or would like to suggest further
topics to be included, then please contact John Woodgate,
()

Contributions by:
Tim Pierce, Pat Boren, Alf Christophersen, William Mills, Richard
Pence, Hugh Ainsley, Alexandre Meissonnier, Randy Klear, Dave Sadler,
Carl Cason, Margaret J. Olson, Jim Eggert, Ian Rawnsley, Linnea Ista,
Cathy Deschu
Changes For This Version (5th July 1999)
Moved to a new server

Copyright And Disclaimer

Copyright (c) 1999 by John Woodgate. All rights reserved.

This document may be freely redistributed in its entirety without
modification provided that this copyright notice is not removed. It may not
be sold for profit or incorporated in commercial documents without the
prior written permission of the copyright holder. Permission is expressly
granted for this document to be made available for file transfer from
installations offering unrestricted anonymous file transfer on the
Internet.

This document is provided AS IS without any express or implied warranty.

The author may be contacted at 50 Great Meadow Road, Bradley Stoke,
Bristol, BS32 8DA, England.

Contents

* Common Courtesies
* Patience and Tolerance
* Subject Lines
* Personal Privacy
* Requests For Information
* Replying To A Message
* Signature Files
* Mailing Lists
* Attaching Files
* Dealing with Junk Mail
* Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
* The Use of Upper Case or CAPITALS
* Further Information

Common Courtesies

Read carefully what you receive to make sure that you understand the
message.

Read carefully what you send, to make sure that your message will not be
misunderstood.

Know your audience. Make sure that the person or list of people you are
sending your message to are right ones to be communicating with.

Many readers have very limited, and in some cases expensive electronic mail
facilities. Be particularly careful not to cause unnecessary traffic, or to
send unnecessary long messages.

Please DO NOT send "test messages." The system works. If you must test it,
at least send a valid message, with useful information or questions. In
fact there is a newsgroup called misc.test, set up specifically for test
messages. If you post to this group, you will get email responses from a
number of servers around the world which will allow you to judge how
quickly and thoroughly your posts propagate.

Patience And Tolerance

Remember that not all readers have your native language as their native
language, so make allowance for possible misunderstandings and unintended
discourtesies.

Remember that the absence of visual clues normally associated with face to
face communication provides an ideal environment for being misunderstood.

Be tolerant of newcomers. None of us were born knowing all.

If you are using humour or sarcasm, make sure to clearly label it as such.
Humour is usually indicated by a smiley e.g. :) or (grin).

Subject Lines

Always include a descriptive subject line in your message. Use the Subject:
line to get attention and make sure it describes the main point of your
message. Avoid very long subjects as some newsreaders only display the
first 30 characters or so. If you are seeking information about a family,
include the surname in UPPERCASE in the Subject: line.

Remember that with many messages each week, many people use the subject
line to decide if they should read your message or not. "Need help" or
"Genealogy" are not good subject lines. Likewise, not everybody who reads
this newsgroup lives in the same country as you. Please give an indication
of the country or countries you are interested in together with a date
range.

Keep messages to only one subject. Second subjects within a single message
are often missed.

The information contained in the subject line should also be included in
the message itself as some news readers display the subject line on a
different screen to the message body.

Personal privacy

Please be careful about the information you post to the newsgroup or the
mailing list. For example, if somebody asks you to look up some names and
addresses in the local telephone directory, send the results directly to
the requester.

Please be very careful about the amount of detail you post to the world.
Consider if you would like to have the details of your birth, particularly
if your parents weren't married at the time, broadcast to the world. And
that is quite mild compared to some of the skeletons you might dig up.

As use of the Internet grows, we are beginning to see it being abused.
Please think carefully before you post private details about yourself, or
any present day individual to the world.

Request For Information

Be specific, especially when asking questions. If you ask about a person,
identify when and where the person might have lived. You are much more
likely to get a helpful reply if your message summarizes what efforts you
have already made yourself to find the answer to your question.

Please do not post to this newsgroup or mailing list messages which should
be more appropriately addressed to one of the other groups in the
soc.genealogy hierarchy. And please avoid posting the same message to
several newsgroups or mailing lists in the hierarchy, except when its
content is equally relevant to each such newsgroup.

Avoid cluttering your message with excessive emphasis (such as stars,
exclamation marks "!", etc). It can make the message hard to follow.

For straightforward queries which are simply seeking further information
about a particular surname, or a named individual, it is recommended that
the group of newsgroups soc.genealogy.surnames.* be used rather than any
other newsgroup or mailing list. This is because soc.genealogy.surnames
newsgroups are moderated as well as archived. The moderators ensure that
subject lines are given in an informative and stylized format, providing
details of dates and locations as well as the surname in question. This is
aimed at facilitating searches of the entire large archive of messages that
have ever been sent to the newsgroup, searching for all messages which
relate to a given family.

For those people who are restricted to using email only, the
soc.genealogy.surnames newsgroups are also available as mailing lists.

Please keep line lengths to about 72 characters to avoid problems with word
wrap on replies. Most mail programs prepend the included lines with a '> '.
It doesn't take many replies to extend the line over the normal 80
characters display size.

Replying to a message

Feel free to answer questions or provide clarification or comments in
response to any posting you see on the newsgroup or mailing list. However,
please "FOLLOW-UP" to the posting ONLY if you think your comments will be
of interest to other readers and you wish your answer sent to all the
newsgroup and mailing list readers. Otherwise please use the 'Reply'
function on your newsreader to respond directly to the poster. If your
newsreader doesn't allow 'Reply', note the e-mail address of the original
poster and send an e-mail directly to that person.

If you want to start a personal correspondence with the poster of a
message, look in the header of the note and find the "FROM:" or "REPLY TO:"
field where you will find that person's email address. You can then send
your note directly to that person.

Many newsreaders and mail programs provide easy means of replying to the
poster of a particular message, and/or of posting a follow-up message,
handling all the complications of message addressing automatically. Please
make sure that you do not post a follow-up message accidentally, when your
intention was merely to reply directly to the poster.

If you are responding to a message, either include the relevant part of the
original message, or make sure you unambiguously refer to the original
contents. It is very common for people to read your reply before they read
the original message. However, please avoid unnecessarily lengthy
quotations from the messages to which you are responding.

One point to bear in mind is that most Internet Service Providers delete
messages after 2 or 3 days. You cannot rely on any one message being
received by another subscriber. It is this very lack of permenance which
makes it vital to register any surnames you are interested in in the
soc.genealogy.surnames newsgroup so that it can be added to the archive.

Signature Files

Always 'sign' your message with your name and your preferred e-mail
address. This is especially important because some e-mail and newsreader
software do not always convey the originator's full e-mail address. While
you may certainly include your regular mail address in your postings, you
may wish to give this out only in personal replies, when necessary.

Please DO NOT include a list of the surnames you are researching in your
signature file. If the messages are archived (and most newsgroups are
archived) and somebody is searching for your surname, they need to find it
only once; hopefully it will have your address with it as well. If they are
searching, and get too many hits, then they may not request all the
messages and therefore may miss seeing your message.

Many new email clients now default to attaching a copy of your message.
This means that your message gets sent twice. Please ensure that you have
this feature turned off when you send a message to a newsgroup or mailing
list. You should also consider if you need to send your messages in MIME
format, or would plain ASCII text be better?

There is an increasing trend to include V-Cards at the end of a message.
While this may be a useful feature in a business environment, it is yet
more wasted space when sent to a newsgroup or mailing list. The problem in
Win95 is that they accumulate unless you purge them. Each of them will
consume 16k (despite the file size of 176 bytes or whatever it is).

Mailing Lists

Some newsgroups are also linked, or gatewayed, to a mailing list. This
means the all messages sent to the newsgroup are also sent to the mailing
list. Thus people who can only use email can still take part in the
discussions.

There is always a separate email address to send messages to the mailing
list to that you use to subscribe, or talk to the computer. The computer
often uses the name LISTSERV or LISTPROC. The mailing list address will be
something list GENBRIT-L, or GENMSC-L. If you use the wrong address, you
will end up sending messages to the computer, which will ignore them, and
commands to the mailing list, which EVERYBODY will see.

Attaching Files

A lot of the newer mail and news programs provide a mechanisim which will
allow you to 'attach' a file to your message. This can be a photo, a sound
recording or even a complete family history book in your favourite word
processor format. Even if you are sure everybody will be able to read it,
the odds are that once it has passed through the internet it will be
impossible to for anybody to understand without a lot of work. Please don't
do it.

Sending GEDCOM files, Tiny Tafels, Decendent lists and any large lists
should also be avoided. Not everybody has access to the Internet via their
workplace or college. Some people have to pay for their access time.
Downloading large files which they are not going to be interested in is a
waste of their time and money. Much better to post a short message saying
that you have the information if they are interested and then send it to
just those people who request it.

Including files in any format other than straight ASCII is to be avoided.
The use of uuencoded files, zipped files or even HTML files are likely to
mean that nobody will read your message. In some groups it will result in
the message being rejected.

Dealing with Junk mail

It is an unfortunate fact of life that with the expansion of the Internet
we are all likely to receive junk mail at some point. Because the majority
of the newsgroups and mailing lists are not moderated, then there is little
that can be done to automatically stop these messages. So what can you do
when you recieve junk mail?

Firstly, do not post a message to the newsgroup or mailing list that it
arrived in. This will just increase the 'noise' in the group or list. If
the message came directly to you, then you are in a better position to do
something. Here are a list of suggested steps you might take:

* Never buy anything from someone who sends you unsolicited advertising
by email. Many of these offers are fraudulent and the advertising
method is by definition, underhand. If nobody bought from them, they
would quickly stop.
* Learn how to reveal the 'full headers' in a mail message. This will
show you the route the message took to you. Most mail systems show
just the basic information ("To", "From", "Subject", "Date", etc).
Even if the "From" address shows as , the message may not
have come from AOL, the advertiser may not ever have had an account on
AOL. By examining the full headers, in the vast majority of cases you
can see where the message really came from.
* Forward the message, including the full headers, to the services that
handled the message complaining that you don't want such mail. Send it
to the following addresses: abuse@[domain] and postmaster@[domain].
For example, if the message came through Interramp, then send the
messages to , and . Why two
addresses? Many ISPs don't have an 'abuse' address; If they don't then
you should encourage them to implement one. They are all required to
have a postmaster account.
* If the postmaster gets thousands of complaints about this kind of
activity, then they will soon realize that it is not worth it to allow
these kinds of people to access their systems. If you want your
message to to be taken seriously, then be polite. Verbal abuse could
lose you your account!

Other types of junk mail include chain mail, virus warnings and the like.
If you get a message that requests, often urgently, that you spread the
message far and wide, that's a good sign to delete it. These often claim
that they are 'helping a good cause', like the cancer struck kid that
wanted to get into the Guinness Book of Records by getting as many cards in
the mail as possible. The child exists and got 16 MILLION cards in the
first year - 1990!

The virus warnings mails are fake too and keep going despite being years
old. The 'Good Times', 'Deeyenda', 'Irina' and 'Ghost.exe' warnings are all
hoaxes and spreading them around causes nothing but resource drains, bother
and sometimes panic in the people you send them to.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Read the Frequently Asked Question list (FAQ) for the appropriate newsgroup
or mailing list before posting anything. A list of the FAQs available for
the soc.genealogy.* newsgroups can be found in the Genealogy Meta-FAQ which
is available via the WWW at the URL
http://www.woodgate.org/FAQs/meta-faq.html. It is also avaialable via
anonymous FTP from: http://ftp.woodgate.org/FAQs/meta-faq.txt.

The Meta-FAQ is posted periodically to all soc.genealogy.* newsgroups.
Users new to Usenet should also read the informational postings available
in the news.announce.newusers newsgroup and at the URL
http://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.announce.newusers.

The Use of Upper Case or CAPITALS

In order to allow people to quickly scan your message to see if it might be
of interest to them, remember to put surnames and place names in captials.
This will help them to stand out. However, do not put everything in
capitals as this is considered to be SHOUTING.

Further Information

If you want more information, there is a very good web page on Netiquette
at the URL http://www.fau.edu/rinaldi/netiquette.html

On the topic of junk mail, take a look at the following URLs

* http://www.crew.umich.edu/~chymes/newusers/Think.html
* http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
* http://www.vix.com/spam/

------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.woodgate/org/FAQs/Netiquette.html / 5th July 1999 / webmaster

This thread:

• [FAQ] Basic Newsgroup & Mailing List Netiquette by