Hi,
With an increasing amount of mails coming through this list, there's
also an increasing amount of emails which not conform to netiquette as
it is known to long-time usenet and mailing list users
but obviously not to people new to mailing lists, free software and Linux.
These netiquette rules are very helpful to get mailing lists with a
lot of posts ordered, clean, and easy to read and understand, which in
turn makes responding and helping much easier.
Therefore, I propose getting some important rules together for posting
to this list, and publish them at some central point (e.g. at the
subscription page at xensource), so new people can read it _before_
subscribing. (BTW, I am not sure if the subscription messages contain
such info already, but obviously not everybody reads them).
My proposals ( in no particular order), which should be discussed
before setting them up:
1) don't add legal privacy disclaimers to your mails - they tend to
have more than 10 lines, and they aren't useful at all to solve
technical problems with xen (and, by the way, also don't help to keep
any business secret!)
2) Don't start a new thread as response to an existing thread (say, by
clicking on reply in your mailer on an existing thread).
3) please specify, short but exactly, what you are trying to
accomplish. What you did to accomplish this, and what the symptoms of
your problems are.
If you searched documentation or list archives about your problem,
it's sometimes good to say so, because people might tell you to read
the docs first.
4) before posting questions, read the xen manual, the README files,
the wiki, and the mailing list archives. Use google or your favorite
search engine. Only after finding no answer there, post to the list.
5) avoid cross-posting to multiple lists
6) don't post your full logfiles without being asked to do so. You can
post the some lines of a logfile, if you think there's an interesing
information for analyzing the problem (warnings/errors/uncommon
messages) - but no unfiltered full log/output
7) Use an appropriate list - xen-users for question about usage of
stable versions, xen-devel for reporting and discussing problems with
unstable/testing versions.
8) don't write test mails to the list! Not for yourself, and not as an
administrator to solve your user's problems posting to the list.
9) don't repost your questions unchanged. If nobody replies to your
request, but you are sure somebody must know a solution or at least
have a hint, it's very likely that nobody understands your problem.
Try to describe it better.
10) unsubscribing from the list is NOT done by mailing to the list's
address. remember that if you want to get off the list. just use the
links at the end of the list mails...
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