listiquette was: [MPlayer-users] mplayer - fbdev - cron

[Dominik Mierzejewski]

On Wednesday, 23 July 2003, Carl Karsten wrote:
[...]
> > > If someone will point me to a netiquette page, I will do my best to
> > > follow it.
> >
> > See RFC1855. You do know what RFCs are, don't you?
> 
> Now that I have spent 30 min reading that over 46k of text, I don't see
> how it addresses any of the complaints (top posting, quote chars, pgp
> signed formats - doesn't even contain the string "mua".)  So if this page
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt is the guidelines, I seem to be in
> compliance.

Oh, but you aren't. Your lines are too long (I reformatted your text in
this reply) and you unnecessarily quote entire messages at the bottom of
your reply. And RFC 1855 states clearly:
[...]
     - Be brief without being overly terse.  When replying to a message,
       include enough original material to be understood but no more. It
       is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including
       all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

     - Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line
       with a carriage return.
[...]

> If you disagree, or have any other pages, quote the relevant
> text and URL it is from. Example: "But do not include the entire
> original!"  It shouldn't take anyone more than a few minutes to figure out
> if it is relevant or not.

Good example, by the way. It illustrates perfectly what you're doing wrong.

> If you post and I feel it is constructive, I'll reply with a thanks -
> otherwise I'll just ignore it.

OK. Since you obviously don't have time to look it up yourself (or don't
care), here is another, http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-etiquette.html
strictly about mailing lists:
[...]
               Are there any important formatting considerations?
[...]
   Most importantly, learn to use the enter (or return) key on your keyboard.
   The video display width of many network users is limited to 80 columns,
   and text which wraps beyond that length is quite a bit more difficult to
   read. Since your text may be indented when quoted by others you should
   keep your lines to a maximum length somewhere below that point -- around
   70 characters is a good target. There are of course exceptions, such as
   wide tables, and long URLs, but the rule is to keep it well under 80.
[...]
              When replying, should I quote the previous message?
[...]
   However, when quoting, be very careful to edit the quoted sections down to
   the bare minimum of text needed to maintain the context for your reply.
   There is very little on a mailing list that is more annoying than paging
   through a few pages of quoted text only to read a few lines at the end.
[...]
   It is a good thing to include excerpts from previous
   messages with your replies to maintain a logical flow of discussion, but
   it is almost always a bad thing to include the entire text of a message
   being replied to, be it at the start or end of your reply.
[...]

I hope this is clear now.

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://www.piorunek.pl/~dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/
"The Universe doesn't give you any points for doing things that are easy."
        -- Sheridan to Garibaldi in Babylon 5:"The Geometry of Shadows"