-- to increase your chances of getting a helpful reply, and decrease your chances of upsetting people.
Contents:
Other useful
guidelines
List Subjects:
On topic:
- Linux / generic Unix questions that you have tried to answer yourself.
- Generic discussion of interest to the Linux community.
- Job postings related to, and mentioning, Linux, Unix or Open Source.
Off topic:
- Any question that you have not made an honest attempt to answer yourself.
- Job postings that are not related to and do not mention Linux, Unix, or Open Source.
- Flame wars, flame
bait, or anything else resembling a flame.
- Any posting with excessive amounts of quoted text (defined as longer than
the length of original text) or posts with excessively long signatures.
Other Notes:
- File Attachments
- It is almost universally inappropriate to post files to
mailing lists or newsgroups. The only exceptions being newsgroups which
exist specifically to distribute binaries (where it is inappropriate to
post without a file attachment).
Do not email files to this list. Put the file on the web somewhere, and
email a url to it to this list.
- HTML
- Please do not post HTML format email to the list. Use plaintext.
- Post Deletion
- It's very difficult for us to delete posts from the archive and we don't like changing history. The PLUG list is fully indexed by Google so please be sure you want your post "online forever" before posting.
When asking questions...
Most importantly, it is good form to do your best to try to answer your questions yourself through the documents readily available to you before asking the nearly three-hundred people on the mailing list. If you have not made the effort, why should
they ? It is considered a waste of our time. (See "RTFM".)
Once you have made an honest effort to solve the problem yourself, I believe most of us on the list will be happy to do our best to help. Keep in mind that we are doing this in our free time, and sometimes no response simply means that nobody knows the answer.
Steps you should try:
- Form your question into a single sentence, and type that into a google.com/linux query.
- Read the documentation that comes with the software you're having problems with ("You know that file called 'README'?"). On your computer, these should be in the directory /usr/doc/<package_name> or /usr/share/doc/<package_name>.
- Read the entire HOWTO related to your question.
- "man" ("an interface to the on-line reference manuals") is your friend. Run "man man" to see how it works. Run "man <command_name>" to get documentation on a command.
- Try running "<command> --help".
- Try running "info <command>".
When you have exhausted all other resources, and either have found no solution, or absolutely cannot figure out where to begin, that is when to post your question to the mailing list. There are some steps you can take when asking your question that help to elicit a more timely and useful reply.
Mention what you've tried and documents you've read through. Give a detailed description of your
situation/hardware/software. Do not post "I have a problem, if someone is willing to help, please email me offlist". That is
unproductive and irritating
A descriptive subject is so much more helpful than "I need help", or "Linux question".
Email Signature Etiquette
Email signatures are the things that you put at the bottom of an email with contact information, and maybe some other little bit of information that you, for some reason, think the world needs to see every time you write email. There are common standards that this signature should conform to. A signature should be:
- No more than 4 lines long.
- The line just before your signature should be: "-- " (two dashes, followed by a space, and a newline) so that mailreaders can detect where it begins and colorize it differently so I can see I probably don't want to read it.
- No more than 80 columns wide.
So an appropriate sig looks something like this:
--
"You shall know the truth, and it shall make you odd."
- Flannery O'Connor
http://www.ChaosReigns.com
Return to the PLUG Index.
Thu Mar 18 16:53:59 EST 2004