Re: Question from Dumbo again!

Mandy <mandy2uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell) wrote:

snivelling cowardly troll wrote:
[snip]

post what you want to post, its text and
isnt infringing in any way on anyone else.
[snip]

Malformed posts infringe on all honest users of Usenet, since they
make Usenet a harder place to read and navigate.


Ah right... am I getting the hang of it now or am I still making major
balls up mistakes?

Oh blimey! - don't worry about it *at all*. Netiquette is a set of
rules - guidelines, really - that exist to explain `how to do it in the
general case'. Some newsgroups are such that you want to stick to the
rules quite closely - well, if everyone's sticking to the rules, it
really does work more smoothly. In a *FEW* really annoying newsgroups,
a sig one line over spec will get you flamed to the uttermost corners of
Earth - avoid them (ISTR demon.local used to be like that, but only
Demon subscribers have/had acccess to it and since that's never been me
I've never seen it in action).

This one - well, so many people ignore so much of netiquette (and it's a
major pain at times; why else do I ignore most of Lachlan's replies, do
you think?) <shrug> Near approximations to the rules is as good here as
sticking to them precisely, from the point of view of utility - and the
rules are only there to make life better for us users, you know?
There's no point in them if they don't. Basically, don't *worry* about
any of this stuff here. If no-one's pointing out that you ought to be
doing X instead of Y, you're clearly not making life significantly
harder for anyone with your posts, so there's nothing to worry about at
all.

(actually, you could usefully snip more text from your replies; but then
again, so could I - like I say, don't worry about it)

That's why netiquette was developed by the people who use Usenet.
There have, of course, long been those who enjoy disrupting Usenet,
and one of the ways they do that is by subvevting netiquette - which
isn't a set of imposed rules, but is a set of rules worked out by
Usenetters to make Usenet work better for Usenetters.

Groovy! I'm slowly but surely starting to get the hang of it again :o)

The `big things' that *really* get up peoples' noses are top posting and
excessively large sigs and (in extreme cases) failure to snip unwanted
text.

Aside from that - well, relax! The rules aren't there to make people
worry that they've got to stick to 'em - they're there to make life
easier. If `it's working okay', then you've got the hang of it.
There's feedback all the time in Usenet, y'see - you'll soon find out if
you're ignoring netiquette in a fashion that causes problems for
someone, 'cos they'll tell you. And since you're not getting people
telling you to `do it like this, not that', you're clearly getting it
adquately right.

Trolls and other low-lifes like to pretend that anyone who suggests
that netiquette should be followed is trying to `enforce' things on
people - that is of course aways a lie. We cannot enforce: all we can
do is point out patiently that these rules were invented by the users
of Usenet because they discovered that following the rules made Usenet
better for everyone (except those who enjoy smashing things up).
That's why the rules exist: the users found that they worked.


Cool! The bods that came up with these rules really knew what they were
doing! :o)

Well, they were *doing it*, weren't they? Back in the old days, it was
all university researchers and postdoc students and people like that who
were involved (as well as their equivalents in the military/industrial
establishments hooked up to the 'net) and they wanted it to work
smoothly for their own benefit. They evolved ways of working using
purely co-operative peer-to-peer anarchist methods - and that's why the
rules work so well. Nothing imposed about them: they were all worked
out by the people who wanted to have some guidelines to make their lives
easier and better.

[snip]

Rowland.

--
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