Teaching Culture

Teaching Culture!

Project > Netiquette Rules

Teaching Culture! Netiquette Guidelines

These netiquette guidelines were proposed and approved on 5 May 2004.
Thank you for keeping them in mind for our project correspondence.

User Guidelines for one-to-one communication

1. In order to ensure that people know who you are, be sure to include a line or two at the end of every message with contact information. You can create this file ahead of time and add it to the end of your messages. (Some mailers do this automatically.) In Internet parlance, this is known as a “signature”. Your signature takes the place of your business card. It should be part of the body; do NOT attach it to the message.
2. Don’t use advanced web design features such as colours or “bold” in the body of the email message. Send plain ASCII text messages.
3. Rather than sending emotional responses to messages you should wait overnight.
4. 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 the entire previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.
5. Mail should have a subject heading which clearly reflects the content of the message.
6. Don’t include addressees as undisclosed recipients (bcc). Use visible copy (cc) instead.

User Guidelines for one-to-many communication

1. Messages and articles should be brief and to the point. Normally they should not be longer than one screen. More substantial concepts etc. should be sent as attachments. There should be only one topic per message. If there are several points you would like to discuss, consider sending two separate messages.
2. Subject lines should follow the conventions of the group. They should include the name of the main addressee if one person is in charge of a particular topic. If everybody should read the message, you can put “All” in front of the subject line. If several topics are mentioned, please mention each of them in the subject line.
3. If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
4. Be careful when you reply to messages or postings. Frequently replies are sent back to the address which originated the post – which in many cases is the address of a list or group! You may accidentally send a personal response to a great many people, embarrassing all involved. It’s best to type in the address instead of relying on “reply.”
5. Avoid sending messages or posting articles which are no more than gratuitous replies to replies. If your message contains fewer than four new lines it might not be worth sending. The content of a follow-up post should always exceed the amount of quoted content. To provide positive feedback for a posting which is of high interest to the group, a GROUP APPLAUSE (subject line, use sparingly!) by the project leader avoids loads of individual “thank you” messages.

Inspired by RFC 1855, http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.html