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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1995-10 > 0815185723


From: John Woodgate <>
Subject: FAQ: Basic Newsgroup & Mailing List "Netiquette"
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 00:28:43 GMT


Archive-name: genealogy/netiquette
Posting-Frequency: 1st of the month
Last-Modified: 1995/07/17
Version: 1.1

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.

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.
Changes For This Version (1.1 - 1995/07/17)
Revised Layout
Revised copyright and Disclaimer

Copyright And Disclaimer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Copyright (c) 1995 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 Meersbrook Technical Services, 35 Argyle
Road, Meersbrook, Sheffield, S8 9HG, England.

Contents
~~~~~~~~

* Common Courtesies
* Patience and Tolerance
* Subject Lines
* Personal Privacy
* Requests For Information
* Replying To A Message
* Signature Files

Common Courtesies
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Patience And Tolerance
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

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

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

4. 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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. 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.

2. 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.

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

Personal privacy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. 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.

2. 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.

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

4. For straightforward queries which are simply seeking further
information about a particular surname, or a named individual, it
is recommended that the newsgroup soc.genealogy.surnames be used
rather than any other newsgroup or mailing list. This is because
soc.genealogy.surnames is a moderated as well as archived
newsgroup. 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.

5. Morover, tiny tafels from soc.genealogy.surnames also get
transferred into a FideoNet-based system (The Tafel-Matching
System) which further increases the chance that such enquiries
might receive an answer.

6. For those people who are restricted to using email only, the
soc.genealogy.surnames newsgroup is also available as the GENNAM-L
mailing list. You can send messages to it by using the address


7. 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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

Signature Files
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. 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.

2. 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.

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Netiquette / V1.0 - 1995/07/17 /

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