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Netiquette 2007-08#1
New reader? Great! Welcome! Here's how to make best use of this newsgroup and get yourself a slice of the best help available. Now read on ...
Errm, first a delicate point. Often users accessing a forum like this for the first time don't realize that posts don't show up immediately, certainly not for several minutes, and maybe not for some hours. In the old days, it took as long as the camel bearing the news took! So they tend to post "test" messages. Please don't!
It really is a netiquette faux pas; it gets on the regulars' nerves and will get you flamed. It's much like switching a light switch on and off would get on the nerves of the people in the room!
Just sit back and wait for the post to show up, or be subtle enough to post something that at least looks like a sensible post, not just a "hello, testing, testing"! And if you really want to post "testing, testing" messages, post to the approved test group next door or above in the news hierarchy. Those groups include at least:
By all means, experiment and test - in the proper place.
You may notice that we get many hundreds of posts a week here. That's a lot of posts, and a lot of reading for the people who read these groups, who, after all, are the people who are going to answer your questions. So it's in your interest to reduce the amount of reading they have to do. Often, you can get an answer faster without posting your question at all! Before you post, you should try:
Some day you may encounter the phrase "RTFM", which stands for "Read the Fine Manual" (except 'F' doesn't really stand for "Fine"). If you ask someone a question and they tell you to RTFM, it's an indication that you haven't done your homework and you should look harder (or for the first time!) at the material they indicate.
By the way, when these people use terminology like "read(2)", they are referring to the man page in section 2 of the manual which deals with the "read" command, and you would access this page by the command "man 2 read", typed at a command line. Yes, there is a command line. Let's not go through that just now ...
By the way, regular posters use a lot of acronyms. "BTW" means "by the way", BTW. Try The Jargon Lexicon as a reference.
Your question almost certainly has already been answered in the past, because you are not alone in the universe! Other people have used the same software as you. Other people have bought the same hardware. Go here, fill in the search field with likely words, hit return and see what comes up:
What? No answer? You're ET. Naw ... you need to practice using search engines. Use words that are likely to get a response, and repeat the search refining each time the keywords you use until you get just the responses you want. It's a very good idea to let "linux" be the first of them! For exmaple
linux debian faq
should pull up references to the debian FAQ.
Still no success? OK. Then you're down to
To which newsgroup should you post?
A comprehensive overview of 159 Linux newsgroups:
www.linux.org/docs/usenetlinux.htm
Don't ask why there are so many. Perhaps it's part of Linus' "World domination" plan. Who knows? ;)
If you are unsure, try in comp.os.linux.misc or alt.os.linux and with a little luck, some wizard will answer your question or/and direct you to the proper place.
How should you post? Here is what the technical experts want to see:
data, data and data, but not your impressions. That is, no "narrative description" but instead an exact reproduction, by copy and paste with the mouse, of each and every datum that you are basing your ideas of what is going on on. Do not trust yourself to type! Use the mouse. You will miss data of great significance to others that will mislead (and annoy!) them, such as a space, a capital letter, a digit instead of a letter, etc. etc.
This is already implied by the above, but include debug logs or/and full error messages (repeat, the originals, not hand copies). Do not "attach" them! Include them in-line in the text because people need to see them simultaneously with your commentary, and in the context of your narrative. Post a reasonable amount of those logs (rows <= 25). You'll ease up things if you include which distro you are running, if unsure 'cat /etc/*release', 'cat /etc/*version' or/and 'lsb_release -d' should tell (most distro).
Again, this got implied above, but it's worth emphasizing. Use ASCII (text) only! Don't use HTML or add any vcards or alike. Please use a maximum line width of 65-72 (characters), except where the log line or error message you quote is longer (it shouldn't usually be), in which case preserve it exactly in preference to confusing the issue by adding your own line breaks, no matter how long it is.
Trying to post your question to Usenet from some web-forum or (especially) groups.google.com significantly lowers the chance of getting a useful reply. This is because people are starting to kill (cause their news reader to not see) such posts due to frequent uncontrolled abuse. If your ISP does not provide access to a Usenet news server, there are other free and low cost alternatives. See the newsgroups "alt.usenet.news-server-comparison" and "alt.free.newsservers" for suggestions.
How would such a beast look like? Go to: Google Groups Advanced Search Cut&Paste into "Message ID": uViCr8LlbtmJ-pn2-j4FfJwqUgJxj@poblano + hit return.
The Subject: line of an article is what will first attract people to read it. If it's vague or doesn't describe what's contained within, no one will read the article. They have better things to do with their lives.
However, Subject: lines that're too wordy tend to be irritating.
For example:
Good Subject:
xinetd failure Mandriva 10.1, error:"cps time argument not a number
Good Subject:
bind 9.2 FC 3 fails to cache multiple cnames
Bad Subject:
Can't dial to Internet!!! Pulling my hair apart, nothing
works! HELP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bad Subject:
HELP!!!! Ftp doesn't work for me at all, how come !?!?!
Simply put, try to think of what will best help the reader when he or she encounters your article in a newsreading session. Also think about who you want to answer. Do you want a psychiatrist? No? Then avoid "HELP !!!!" as a subject line. If you want an expert in oracle databases, then post "oracle vX.Y on Suse SLES 9. How assign passwd?".
And don't forget - the subject line is NOT part of the article, no more than the title of a newspaper article is part of the newspaper article. So don't be shy about repeating the subject in the article as the first line. It costs you a cut and paste with the mouse, and saves everyone else an "eh, what's 'e on about?" Not everyone reads the subject before reading the article, and even those who do may only be able to see the first 40 characters or so of your elegant title.
This is a bit boring, but you really do want to know this. Put it down in your "advanced posting techniques" file. Let's go ... Now, the "Newsgroups:" line on your posting isn't limited to containing just one group, an article can be posted in a list of groups. For instance, the line
Newsgroups: alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.setup
posts the article to both the groups alt.os.linux and comp.os.linux.setup at the same time. More accurately, it makes the same article accessible from both these different newsgroups. This is called "cross-posting". It's usually safe to cross-post to up to three or four groups. To list more than that is considered excessive and annoying and will earn you some heat. Let's not get into why. But it's not as annoying as "multi-posting", which is posting copies of the same article to several different newsgroups, and you should more readily be able to imagine why that's likely to win you undying flames.
Anyway, to summarize, cross-posting is infinitely better than multi-posting, but don't cross-post to more than three or so groups.
It's strongly suggested that when an article is cross-posted then a "Followup-To:" header field be included. It should name the group to which all additional discussion should be directed to. For the above example, this might be:
Followup-To: comp.os.linux.setup
which would make all followups automatically be posted to just comp.os.linux.setup, rather than both alt.os.linux and comp.os.linux.setup.
Why would anyone be cross-posting (or multi-posting, owww!) in the first place? Presumably because that way they think they'll get a bigger audience and therefore more answers. Unfortunately, this is on the way to being about as clever thinking as posting a spam mail to the whole of hong kong asking for help with the problem would be. Enough said?
How far along the way on that particular road to infamy you get depends on whether you cross-posted or multi-posted, and how many groups you did it to, and whether you at least set a Followup-To. If in doubt, don't do it at all. And if you're reading this, you are in doubt, so please don't!
When following up to an article, many newsreaders provide the facility to quote the original article with each line prefixed by >, as in
In article <1232@foo.bar.com>, sharon@foo.bar.com wrote: >> I think that basketweaving's really catching on, particularly in >> Pennsylvania. Here's a list of every person in PA that currently >> engages in it publicly: [..]
This example began to quote a horribly long article, but broke off and indicated the missing text with ellipses "[..]". That's excellent posting technique! I.e.
When you quote another person, edit out whatever isn't directly relevant to understanding your reply.
Please, please, remember to do that.
This gives the reader of the new article a perfect idea of exactly what points you were addressing. By including the entire article, you'll only annoy your readers, assuming you get any! Who knows what your "yes, I agree" is referring to if you quote all 100 lines of the original text! Maybe you are agreeing that hanging is too good for shoplifters. Maybe you are agreeing that it's a good morning.
Now here's another part of good posting technique:
Always put your response below and between the quoted text!
That means, as you read through the text you are replying to in your editor, you remove the bits you are not interested in commenting on, then when you come to a bit you want to comment on, you leave the relevant sentence in place, add an empty line, and write your comment right below it, then leave another empty line.
Then you carry on through the rest of the text. You left the quote and your comment nicely framed and easily comprehensible. Even more importantly, you let somebody new come in and comment on your comment while keeping the framing correct.
Why not "top post"? Well, here are some answers:
In this editor's opinion, you have to understand that you are not writing a business letter to another company's lawyers, which is about the only real life situation in which you will affix the entire previous conversation to the end of your reply! If you think so, then you are mistaking the nature of the medium you are in - we likely already have access to your previous post, thanks to the wonders of electronics, but we might not be bothered to go and look at it or might have forgotten it and its detail, so we appreciate a little orienting context in just the right place, but please not the whole flipping thing.
This "FAQ" (published under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE) has been assembled/rewritten from various online sources, it does not claim to be complete, see URLs above, just a quick start.
Special thanks for additional hints, that have been included to:
Bill Unruh, Bit Twister, Sybren Stuvel, Peter Karlsson and Peter T. Breuer (Complete revision 03/2003), Moe Trin, Stan Goodman, Rick Moen and sk8r-365.
Have a lot of fun...
Michael Heiming
--
If you can't avoid to drop me a mail, remove "www." [from @ www dot heiming dot de] and put my first name before the @.
Blinky Note
This FAQ originally appeared in alt.os.linux.mandrake. It has been reformatted for the web, here, but without changes to content except as noted here:
Changes:
Periodical: Revised to keep pace with Michael's rewrites; this is v2007-07#1
09/09/05 Changed "this faq" to "the debian faq" in "Searching the archives"
02/11/06 Added "/mandriva" to title and header 1.
05/06/06 Added the bracketed phrase in Michael's sig so it makes sense here.
