This is a regular posting which outlines the basic newsgroup and mailing list "Netiquette" which should be followed by anyone who wishes to post to the soc.genealogy.* hierarchy of newsgroups and mailing lists.
This document is part of a regular series of postings which are sent to all appropriate groups and mailing lists. This particular document is posted on the first of every month.
The latest version of this document is available from the following locations
If you have any comments or additions, or would like to suggest further topics to be included, then please contact John Woodgate, (john@woodgate.org)
Copyright (c) 1999 by John Woodgate. All rights reserved.
This document may be freely redistributed in its entirety without modification provided that this copyright notice is not removed. It may not be sold for profit or incorporated in commercial documents without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Permission is expressly granted for this document to be made available for file transfer from installations offering unrestricted anonymous file transfer on the Internet.
This document is provided AS IS without any express or implied warranty.
The author may be contacted at 50 Great Meadow Road, Bradley Stoke, Bristol, BS32 8DA, England.
Read carefully what you receive to make sure that you understand the message.
Read carefully what you send, to make sure that your message will not be misunderstood.
Know your audience. Make sure that the person or list of people you are sending your message to are right ones to be communicating with.
Many readers have very limited, and in some cases expensive electronic mail facilities. Be particularly careful not to cause unnecessary traffic, or to send unnecessary long messages.
Please DO NOT send "test messages." The system works. If you must test it, at least send a valid message, with useful information or questions. In fact there is a newsgroup called misc.test, set up specifically for test messages. If you post to this group, you will get email responses from a number of servers around the world which will allow you to judge how quickly and thoroughly your posts propagate.
Remember that not all readers have your native language as their native language, so make allowance for possible misunderstandings and unintended discourtesies.
Remember that the absence of visual clues normally associated with face to face communication provides an ideal environment for being misunderstood.
Be tolerant of newcomers. None of us were born knowing all.
If you are using humour or sarcasm, make sure to clearly label it
as such. Humour is usually indicated by a smiley e.g. :) or
Always include a descriptive subject line in your message. Use the
Subject: line to get attention and make sure it describes the main
point of your message. Avoid very long subjects as some newsreaders
only display the first 30 characters or so. If you are seeking
information about a family, include the surname in UPPERCASE in the
Subject: line.
Remember that with many messages each week, many
people use the subject line to decide if they should read your
message or not. "Need help" or "Genealogy" are not good subject
lines. Likewise, not everybody who reads this newsgroup lives in
the same country as you. Please give an indication of the country or
countries you are interested in together with a date range.
Keep messages to only one subject. Second subjects within a single
message are often missed.
The information contained in the subject line should also be
included in the message itself as some news readers display the subject
line on a different screen to the message body.
Please be careful about the information you post to the newsgroup or the
mailing list. For example, if somebody asks you to look up some names
and addresses in the local telephone directory, send the results directly
to the requester.
Please be very careful about the amount of detail you
post to the world. Consider if you would like to have the details of
your birth, particularly if your parents weren't married at the time,
broadcast to the world. And that is quite mild compared to some of the
skeletons you might dig up.
As use of the Internet grows, we are
beginning to see it being abused. Please think carefully before you post
private details about yourself, or any present day individual to the world.
Be specific, especially when asking questions. If you ask about a
person, identify when and where the person might have lived. You are
much more likely to get a helpful reply if your message summarizes
what efforts you have already made yourself to find the answer to
your question.
Please do not post to this newsgroup or mailing list messages which
should be more appropriately addressed to one of the other groups in
the soc.genealogy hierarchy. And please avoid posting the same message
to several newsgroups or mailing lists in the hierarchy, except when its
content is equally relevant to each such newsgroup.
Avoid cluttering your message with excessive emphasis (such as
stars, exclamation marks "!", etc). It can make the message hard to
follow.
For straightforward queries which are simply seeking further information
about a particular surname, or a named individual, it is recommended that
the group of newsgroups soc.genealogy.surnames.*
be used rather than any other newsgroup or mailing list. This is
because soc.genealogy.surnames newsgroups are
moderated as well as archived. The moderators ensure that
subject lines are given in an informative and stylized format, providing
details of dates and locations as well as the surname in question. This
is aimed at facilitating searches of the entire large archive of
messages that have ever been sent to the newsgroup, searching for all
messages which relate to a given family.
For those people who are restricted to using email
only, the soc.genealogy.surnames newsgroups are also available as
mailing lists.
Please keep line lengths to about 72 characters to avoid problems
with word wrap on replies. Most mail programs prepend the included lines
with a '> '. It doesn't take many replies to extend the line over the
normal 80 characters display size.
Feel free to answer questions or provide clarification or comments in
response to any posting you see on the newsgroup or mailing list. However,
please "FOLLOW-UP" to the posting ONLY if you think your comments will be
of interest to other readers and you wish your answer sent to all the
newsgroup and mailing list readers. Otherwise please use the 'Reply'
function on your newsreader to respond directly to the poster. If your
newsreader doesn't allow 'Reply', note the e-mail address of the
original poster and send an e-mail directly to that person.
If you want to start a personal correspondence with the poster of a
message, look in the header of the note and find the "FROM:" or "REPLY
TO:" field where you will find that person's email address. You can
then send your note directly to that person.
Many newsreaders and mail programs provide easy means of replying to the
poster of a particular message, and/or of posting a follow-up message,
handling all the complications of message addressing automatically.
Please make sure that you do not post a follow-up message accidentally,
when your intention was merely to reply directly to the poster.
If you are responding to a message, either include the relevant
part of the original message, or make sure you unambiguously refer
to the original contents. It is very common for people to read your
reply before they read the original message. However, please avoid
unnecessarily lengthy quotations from the messages to which you are
responding.
One point to bear in mind is that most Internet Service Providers
delete messages after 2 or 3 days. You cannot rely on any one message
being received by another subscriber. It is this very lack of permenance
which makes it vital to register any surnames you are interested in in
the soc.genealogy.surnames newsgroup so that it can be added to the
archive.
Always 'sign' your message with your name and your preferred e-mail
address. This is especially important because some e-mail and newsreader
software do not always convey the originator's full e-mail address.
While you may certainly include your regular mail address in your
postings, you may wish to give this out only in personal replies, when
necessary.
Please DO NOT include a list of the surnames you are researching in
your signature file. If the messages are archived (and most newsgroups
are archived) and somebody is searching for your surname, they need to find
it only once; hopefully it will have your address with it as well. If they
are searching, and get too many hits, then they may not request all the
messages and therefore may miss seeing your message.
Many new email clients now default to attaching a copy of your message. This
means that your message gets sent twice. Please ensure that you have this
feature turned off when you send a message to a newsgroup or mailing list.
You should also consider if you need to send your messages in MIME format,
or would plain ASCII text be better?
There is an increasing trend to include V-Cards at the end of a message.
While this may be a useful feature in a business environment, it is yet
more wasted space when sent to a newsgroup or mailing list. The
problem in Win95 is that they accumulate unless you purge them.
Each of them will consume 16k (despite the file size of 176 bytes or
whatever it is).
Some newsgroups are also linked, or gatewayed, to a mailing list. This
means the all messages sent to the newsgroup are also sent to the
mailing list. Thus people who can only use email can still take part in
the discussions.
There is always a separate email address to send messages to the
mailing list to that you use to subscribe, or talk to the computer. The
computer often uses the name LISTSERV or LISTPROC. The mailing list
address will be something list GENBRIT-L, or GENMSC-L. If you use the
wrong address, you will end up sending messages to the computer, which
will ignore them, and commands to the mailing list, which EVERYBODY will
see.
A lot of the newer mail and news programs provide a mechanisim which
will allow you to 'attach' a file to your message. This can be a photo,
a sound recording or even a complete family history book in your
favourite word processor format. Even if you are sure everybody will be
able to read it, the odds are that once it has passed through the
internet it will be impossible to for anybody to understand without a
lot of work. Please don't do it.
Sending GEDCOM files, Tiny Tafels, Decendent lists and any large lists
should also be avoided. Not everybody has access to the Internet via
their workplace or college. Some people have to pay for their access
time. Downloading large files which they are not going to be interested
in is a waste of their time and money. Much better to post a short
message saying that you have the information if they are interested and
then send it to just those people who request it.
Including files in any format other than straight ASCII is to be
avoided. The use of uuencoded files, zipped files or even HTML files are
likely to mean that nobody will read your message. In some groups it
will result in the message being rejected.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that with the expansion of the
Internet we are all likely to receive junk mail at some point. Because
the majority of the newsgroups and mailing lists are not moderated, then
there is little that can be done to automatically stop these messages.
So what can you do when you recieve junk mail?
Firstly, do not post a message to the newsgroup or mailing list that it
arrived in. This will just increase the 'noise' in the group or list. If
the message came directly to you, then you are in a better position to
do something. Here are a list of suggested steps you might take:
Other types of junk mail include chain mail, virus warnings and the
like. If you get a message that requests, often urgently, that you
spread the message far and wide, that's a good sign to delete it. These
often claim that they are 'helping a good cause', like the cancer struck
kid that wanted to get into the Guinness Book of Records by getting as
many cards in the mail as possible. The child exists and got 16 MILLION
cards in the first year - 1990!
The virus warnings mails are fake too and keep going despite being years
old. The 'Good Times', 'Deeyenda', 'Irina' and 'Ghost.exe' warnings are
all hoaxes and spreading them around causes nothing but resource drains,
bother and sometimes panic in the people you send them to.
Read the Frequently Asked Question list (FAQ) for the appropriate
newsgroup or mailing list before posting anything. A list of the FAQs
available for the soc.genealogy.* newsgroups can be found in the
Genealogy Meta-FAQ which is available via the WWW at the URL
http://www.woodgate.org/FAQs/meta-faq.html.
It is also avaialable via anonymous FTP from:
http://ftp.woodgate.org/FAQs/meta-faq.txt.
The Meta-FAQ is posted periodically to all soc.genealogy.* newsgroups. Users new to Usenet should also read the
informational postings available in the news.announce.newusers newsgroup and at the URL
http://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.announce.newusers.
In order to allow people to quickly scan your message to see if it might be
of interest to them, remember to put surnames and place names in captials.
This will help them to stand out. However, do not put everything in capitals
as this is considered to be SHOUTING.
If you want more information, there is a very good web page on
Netiquette at the URL
http://www.fau.edu/rinaldi/netiquette.html
On the topic of junk mail, take a look at the following URLs
Subject Lines
Personal privacy
Request For Information
Replying to a message
Signature Files
Mailing Lists
Attaching Files
Dealing with Junk mail
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The Use of Upper Case or CAPITALS
Further Information
www.woodgate/org/FAQs/Netiquette.html / 5th July 1999 / webmaster