Posting Netiquette, "Urgent", and Helpful Mail Servers

It never ceases to amaze me what people can post on newgroups and messageboards and actually expect to receive an answer!

I wouldn't exactly characterize this as a "pet peeve", since I usually don't even bother to read them any longer.

You get tipped off to this when see things such as a post title that says "Please Help" (or, "URGENT" - in caps).

DOH! Of course you are asking for help, isn't that why you made a post? How about putting some descriptive phrase in the title that tells people what subject area the post is about?

In the C# newsgroup, Jon Skeet, whose work I particularly admire, even put together a posting netiquette piece on his web site entitled "Short but Complete"



On eggheadcafe.com , we have a "posting netiquette" page that I often refer offenders to.


Finally MVP Daniel Petri has successfully entered an MS KB Article on the same subject.

Besides providing a useful and descriptive subject line to your post, you want to consider providing information on at least some of the following, as Daniel astutely points out:

  • What are you trying to do?

  • Why are you trying to do it?

  • What did you try already, why, and what was the result of your actions?

  • What was the exact error message that you received?

  • How long have you been experiencing this problem?

  • Have you searched the relevant forum/newsgroup archives?

  • Have you searched for any tools or KB articles or any other resources?

  • Have you recently installed or uninstalled any software or hardware?

  • What changes were made to the system between the time everything last worked and when you noticed the problem?



The bottom line is, posting on groups and forums is an art. You are competing with others for the attention of responders. If you want to get the "first responders", you have to pay attention to what you put in your post.

While all of these have some element of humor in them, they all talk about the same concept: GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). and should be required reading for anyone considering making a post on a newsgroup or forum.

Helpful Mail Servers

You thought I'd forget, didn't you? One more thing that I think is really really DUMB: Mail Server software that sends YOU an email saying that something was wrong with your email that was really sent by a bot that's trying
to hijack your email address (a.k.a. "Xenophobic email attacks").

So what have they accomplished other than to further clog up the bandwidth in Paradise?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m
Read more

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more