SiGNeL - Netiquette

When posting messages to SiGNeL, please be considerate to other subscribers:

 
Is your message meaningful?

• Please avoid one-liners. Subscribers spend time downloading and opening messages. They generally look forward to messages with interesting content.

• Avoid remarks that are supposed to be humourous or sarcastic. Somebody somewhere is bound to misinterpret your statement,w ith the risk of offence. Humour is notoriously difficult to convey through email. The facial expressions, gestures, and stress on certain words which helps to convey humour in speech are absent in email.

• Be concise. Remember, email costs. Most people pay money, everyone pays time.

• Give your post a subject title that accurately reflects what you are writing about. If it's a new topic you want to raise, don't just say "New Topic". Say what the topic is.

• If your message is descended from an existing thread, but the topic has evolved, please modify the subject title, to keep it appropriate.

• Please be consistent and use the same name for yourself when posting to SiGNeL. Others can get very confused who you are if you go by different names.

• When quoting from previous messages, please edit the old headers out, but . . .

• Please indicate clearly, when quoting sentences, who said it.

• When quoting from previous messages, please quote only the sentences you are responding to. It is quite annoying to others to have to read through huge chunks of previous text which have no relation to your reply.

• Similarly, please do not trail the entire incoming message after your response-message. 

• Of course you should delete all previous signature blocks.

• Please avoid using a large signature block yourself. What are you trying to prove?

• Do use paragraphs. Dense text without paragraphs is very difficult for the eye, and other subscribers may simply skip reading it.

• When requesting for information from the list, please ask those who are replying, to reply to you at your private email address.

• When you see a topic being discussed by just 2 or 3 persons, that discussion should move out of SiGNeL into private email.