[Samba] Mailing list HOWTO (Unofficial)

[John H Terpstra]

Jon,

Thank you so much for this VERY timely reminder of good netiquette.
Well done.

Please everyone, remember that it takes a lot of time to answer questions.

Over the past 3 months I have spent an average of 6 hours per day
answering requests from this list. I just checked my sent-mail folder and
am surprised to see 387 responses to people who asked for help from this
list. If you work this out, it equates to an average of 10-15 minutes per
reply. Now that time DOES include research and finding a solution.

What the above shows is that when you make a request you are asking
someone to invest their time in helping to solve your problem. Each of us
who respond have other competing interests and responsibilities. The
quality of your request influences how much attention you will receive.

- John T.

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Jonathan Johnson wrote:

> A few tips when submitting to this or any mailing list. I may be
> preaching to the choir, but some of you can't carry a tune.
>
> 1) Make your subject short and descriptive. Avoid the words "help" or
> "Samba" in the subject. The readers of this list already know that a)
> you need help, and b) you are writing about samba (of course, you may
> need to distinguish between Samba PDC and other filesharing software).
> Avoid phrases such as "what is" and "how do i". Some good subject lines
> might look like "Slow response with Excel files" or "Migrating from
> Samba PDC to NT PDC".
>
> 2) If you include the original message in your reply, trim it so that
> only the relevant lines, enough to establish context, are included.
> Chances are (since this is a mailing list) we've already read the
> original message.
>
> 3) Trim irrelevant headers from the original message in your reply. All
> we need to see is a) From, b) Date, and c) Subject. We don't even
> really need the Subject, if you haven't changed it. Better yet is to
> just preface the original message with "On [date] [someone] wrote:".
>
> 4) Never say "Me too." It doesn't help anyone solve the problem.
> Instead, if you ARE having the same problem, give more information.
> Have you seen something that the other writer hasn't mentioned, which
> may be helpful?
>
> 5) If you ask about a problem, then come up with the solution on your
> own or thru another source, by all means post it. Someone else may have
> the same problem and is waiting for an answer, but never hears of it.
>
> 6) Give as much *relevant* information as possible.
>
> 7) RTFM. Google. groups.google.com.
>
> --Jon
> jon at sutinen.com
>
> P.S. -- "Migrating from NT PDC to Samba PDC" might be a better subject
> line. :-)
>
>

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org