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.meertech.demon.co.uk/genuki/netiquet.htm
Via email by sending the following text in the body of a message to
listserv(a)meertech.demon.co.uk
get netiquet
end
If you have any comments or additions, or would like to suggest further
topics to be included, then
please contact John Woodgate, (john(a)meertech.demon.co.uk)
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
Changes For This Version (1.9 - 1998/09/27)
Added section on V-Cards & HTML extensions. Also added a section on
the use of Upper
Case or Captials.
Copyright And Disclaimer
Copyright (c) 1996-1998 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 English 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
spammer@aol, 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 abuse(a)interramp.com, and
postmaster(a)interramp.com. 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.meertech.demon.co.uk/genuki/meta-faq.htm. It is also
avaialable
via email by sending
the following message:
To: listserv(a)meertech.demon.co.uk
Subject: <Leave Blank>
get meta-faq
end
The Meta-FAQ is posted periodically to all soc.genealogy.* newsgroups.
Users new to Usenet
should also read the informational postinmgs 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/
Netiquette / V1.9 - 1998/09/27 / john(a)meertech.demon.co.uk