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About Netiquette
by
Songweaver
"Netiquette" is a
contemporary term for proper etiquette on the Internet.
Caps Lock
Sometimes people who don't realize how it comes across WILL TYPE IN
ALL CAPITAL LETTERS TO MAKE A POINT. The problem with doing this is
that to most people it comes across AS THOUGH YOU'RE SHOUTING.
In general, if you want to use all caps that's up to you, but you
shouldn't be surprised if people react to you strangely, or as
though you've been yelling at them.
Chain Letters
Chain letters are basically a way to get someone else to spam for
you. They involve sending people messages which instruct them to
redistribute the messages to some number of other people. They are
annoying. They are rude. They are pure evil. But aside from that, in
many places they are also illegal and have in the
past led to individuals losing their net access. So, please, if you
see a chain letter, just say no. Related to chain letters are
various net hoaxes.
FAQs
"FAQ" is short for "Frequently Asked Questions."
Many lists and/or newsgroups come with their own FAQ sheet. Before
asking questions, it's advisable to read this FAQ. It's not just
that people mind answering the same question over and over again.
It's that people tend to have more respect for someone who's willing
to put a little bit of work into something on their own rather than
just sit back and expect everyone else to answer all their questions
for them. Also, be sure to save your FAQs. One very
frequently asked question is "can anyone send me a copy of the
FAQ? I lost mine" (or its variant: "where do I find a FAQ
for this group?"). You will probably receive a copy of it when
you request it. However, you may receive twenty and if you're like
most users, your mailer just can't handle it.
Flaming
Flaming is the practice of attacking people on a personal level.
While flaming is relatively common on the internet, almost everybody
will claim they're opposed to it. They may even flame you for having
flamed someone. It's all really confusing, actually.
However, there are some fairly
obvious things. Responding to someone's analysis of the deficit
crisis by telling them that they probably walk funny or weren't
breast fed could easily classify as flaming. Making rude comments
about an individual's sexual organs or religion would also probably
classify.
Personally, I stick to a simple rule:
I say nothing about anybody that I can not back up with facts. I do
not comment about people's religions, their eating habits, whether
or not they smoke, etc. If I decide to comment about someone's level
of intelligence, I make sure I have good examples to support my
comment. But even then, I do this very rarely.
HTML Tags in E-Mail
HTML is not a bad thing. It can do a lot of great stuff. However, a
lot of people who use web browsers to read their e-mail don't
understand that those of us who don't use such
browsers for our e-mail will receive HTML codes as a sort of
gibberish. When I get something like this, I usually just delete on
sight.
Irrelevant Material
Yes, lots of things are really interesting to all sorts of people.
Yes, it's easy to look at something and think "Cool! They'll
all like this!" My advice: If you see something that's really
interesting and it's also very long, don't post it to a group
without asking if people are interested in it first.
Line Spacing
Generally speaking, it's much easier to read e-mail when there are
line breaks between paragraphs. Look at the following paragraphs:
Flaming is the practice of attacking
people on a personal level. While flaming is relatively common on
the internet, almost everybody will claim they're opposed to it.
They may even flame you for having flamed someone. It's all really
confusing, actually.
However, there are some fairly obvious things. Responding to
someone's analysis of the deficit crisis by telling them that they
probably walk funny or weren't breast fed could easily classify as
flaming. Making rude comments about an individual's sexual organs
or religion would also probably classify.
Personally, I stick to a simple rule: I say nothing about anybody
that I can not back up with facts. I do not comment about people's
religions, their eating habits, whether or not they smoke, etc. If
I decide to comment about someone's level of intelligence, I make
sure I have good examples to support my comment. But even then, I
do this very rarely.
Now look at these:
Flaming is the practice of attacking
people on a personal level. While flaming is relatively common on
the internet, almost everybody will claim they're opposed to it.
They may even flame you for having flamed someone. It's all really
confusing, actually.
However, there are some fairly
obvious things. Responding to someone's analysis of the deficit
crisis by telling them that they probably walk funny or weren't
breast fed could easily classify as flaming. Making rude comments
about an individual's sexual organs or religion would also
probably classify.
Personally, I stick to a simple
rule: I say nothing about anybody that I can not back up with
facts. I do not comment about people's religions, their eating
habits, whether or not they smoke, etc. If I decide to comment
about someone's level of intelligence, I make sure I have good
examples to support my comment. But even then, I do this very
rarely.
You'll notice that the second set is
much
easier to read than the first. When you e-mail people you should try
to maintain these sorts of breaks between lines.
Line Width
You will find that many mailers will allow you to type in more than
eighty characters per line. However, this can create a real mess,
because on the internet, everything is automatically wrapped to 80
lines or fewer. Thus, you get broken lines which are really hard to
follow. For example, look at the following:
It's often occurred to me that many people don't seem
to under-
stand the clear distinction between correlational
variance and
causal relationships.
Now try imagining reading whole pages
like that. If you don't set your mailers to under 80 charaters per
line, this is how people will read your outgoing mail, and most of
them will just delete it rather than bother. The internet is a great
forum for communication, but we have to do what we can to
communicate well on it otherwise things get ugly
quite fast.
Mass Mailing
Almost every e-mailer allows you the opportunity to distribute
e-mail via blind carbon copy. This is a very good
tool if you are going to send e-mail to multiple individuals. The
problem comes when you e-mail something to a whole bunch of people
and their addresses appear in the headers of the e-mail. Sometimes I
get fifty lines of e-mail addresses before I get to the content of
the post (usually, I delete before ever getting to the content when
this happens, and I suspect I'm not alone). Furthermore, the blind
carbon copy protects people's privacy. You may not realize how some
friends of yours enjoy the -privacy- of their e-mail addresses, and
it's good to respect this. Finally, it's important to remember that
some (not always knowingly) people set their e-mailers to
automatically respond to all the e-mail addresses in the headers.
That can create a large mess when mass-mailing, because it just
snowballs, with others doing the same, whether they realize it or
not.
Quoting
When responding to other users, it's very useful to quote some of
what they've said in order to provide context for your response.
However, it is not at all useful to quote their
entire
message unless you are responding to the whole thing. Furthermore,
it's completely unnecessary to quote someone's signature unless
you're responding directly to it. It's also really not at all fun to
see an entire 100-line message quoted only to see "I
agree" at the end of the message. If you don't know how to edit
out irrelevant material, call your help desk or whoever deals with
user questions at your local site. It's not that difficult-- a lot
of people just don't bother.
Signature Files
Signature files can be cute and contain a lot of information.
However, long signatures can also be frustrating, especially after a
one-line message. My rule is that I try to never include a signature
unless the length of my message is going to be at least twice as
long as the signature file in question. I also try to only include
it in one out of every two or three posts I send to a group. There
is no reason to be redundant.
Sliced Spam
Sliced spam is identical to spamming except that it is all sent
individually. This makes it harder to trace the posts and cancel
them from newsgroups. It also takes a lot more work than basic
spamming.
Spamming
Spamming is the practice of sending repeated identical pieces of
mail to a wide variety of newsgroups and/or e-mail addresses. It
tends to be extremely annoying and generates a lot of response mail
which fills newsgroups and mailing lists with irrelevant material.
Spamming is generally frowned upon and unappreciated.
Spoiler Alerts
It's very common on the internet to talk about movies and/or tv
shows that interest you. However, another common practice is the
spoiler alert. This is just a warning in BIG LETTERS SO PEOPLE ARE
SURE TO SEE IT that tells people they're about to read something
that could ruin their enjoyment of the experience in question if
they continue. Traditionally this is followed by 20-30 blank lines,
or lines filled with meaningless garbage to bide the time.
There are questions as to how long
something has to have been available for viewing before removing the
spoiler alerts. Some people put spoiler alerts for episodes of The
Prisoner, which hasn't been on the air since the late 1960's. Other
people omit them a week after the first airing. Since people have
VCR's and some shows are syndicated, I prefer to wait two or three
weeks before removing spoilers from current shows and I generally
disregard them when shows are in syndication (though sometimes I'll
just put them in the subject header without the blank lines). With
movies, I wait until they've come out on video, because there's
always some backwater place that doesn't have some film or another
yet, even though they have internet access.
Subject Headers
Often, it's easy to get distracted while sending e-mail and not pay
attention to the subject headers. However, this can cause trouble.
Eventually people reply to side threads and secondary issues and the
header ends up being "People who tick me off" while the
topic of the message is something about the national debt. Or
possibly, the subject could be "abortion in the 90s" but
instead the topic of the message is your favorite musicians. This is
just plain confusing. So, try your best to make your headers conform
to the message you're posting. It will make people less likely to
mass-delete your mail and everyone will be happier in the long run.
Virus Alerts, Craig Shergold,
Neiman-Marcus and Good Samaritanism
There are lots of hoaxes floating around the internet, such as
warnings about the nonexistent Good Times virus
(which was never true), pleas to send cards to
Craig
Shergold (which was true many years ago but is no longer
relevant) and a cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus
(which was never true).
Please do not perpetuate these
hoaxes. Not only are they often irrelevant, but they are almost as
bad as chain letters. If you receive e-mail that's supposed to be
redistributed to other people, please send a few copies to people
you know asking if it's true before redistributing it to lists of
thousands of people.
Some people may get a little hostile
about seeing such posts. There is a reason for this. We see them a
lot.
Furthermore, one of these good samaritan posts has caused a great
deal of harm. The hospital at which Craig Shergold stayed was unable
to function for some time because they received
so many
get well cards for Shergold that it was impossible to perform normal
operations. Latest word is that Shergold is in remission and living
somewhere far away from that hospital, and he no longer wants get
well cards.
Netiquette Webring
site
is owned by songweaver.com
http://www.webring.org
This site is mirrored
at the Offline Usenet Interface
http://www.ouisoft.com/netiquette.htm
The information above
was excerpted from:
http://kidspenpals.about.com/kids/kidspenpals/gi/dynamic/
offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fsongweaver.com%2Fnetiquette.html
Office
Etiquette (continued). . .
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