Manayunk Neighborhood Council

Chain letters are basically a way to get someone else to spam for you. They involve sending people messages which instruct them to redistribute the messages to other people. They are annoying. They are rude. They are pure evil. But aside from that, in many places they are also illegal and have in the past led to individuals losing their net access. So, please, if you see a chain letter, just say no.

"FAQ" is short for "Frequently Asked Questions." Many lists and/or newsgroups come with their own FAQ sheet.

Flaming is the practice of attacking people on a personal level. Flaming is relatively common on the internet yet almost everybody claims they're opposed to it. Responding to someone's opinion of "permit parking" by telling them that they "talk funny" or "weren't breast fed" could classify as flaming. Making rude comments about an individual's sexual organs or religion would also count. Try not to say anything about anybody that you cannot back up with facts. Do not comment about people's religions, their eating habits, whether or not they smoke, etc. Be nice.

Irrelevant Material can be really interesting but if it's also very long, don't post it to a group without asking if people are interested in it first.

Line Spacing makes it easier to read long messages. Try to maintain breaks between paragraphs.

Line Width is usually automatically wrapped to 80 characters per line or less, however, many mailers will let you type more. The lines will get broken which can be hard to follow.

Reading whole pages like this can be difficult to follow. If you don't set your
mailers to
under 80 charaters per line, this is how people will read your mail. The internet
is a great
forum for communication, but we have to do what we can to communicate well
otherwise
things get ugly quite fast.

Mass Mailing can be a problem when you e-mail a lot of people and all their addresses appear in the headers. Most e-mailers allow you to distribute e-mail via blind carbon copy. This is a good way to send e-mail to multiple individuals. Blind carbon copy also protects people's privacy. Another thing to remember is that some people (unintentionally) respond to all the e-mail addresses. That can create a large mess.

Quoting is useful when you respond to someone's previous message, however, it is not necessary and sometimes frustrating to see a long quote with only an "I agree" at the end. Try replacing irrelevant material with <<<text deleted>>>> or something similar.

Signature files can be cute and contain information, however, long signatures can be frustrating, especially after a short message. There is no reason to be redundant either, so you don't need to include it in every post.

Sliced spam is identical to spamming except that it is sent individually. This makes it harder to trace the posts and cancel them from newsgroups. It also takes a lot more work than basic spamming.

Spamming is the practice of sending repeated identical pieces of mail to a wide variety of adresses. It tends to be extremely annoying and generates a lot of response mail which fills lists with irrelevant material. Spamming is generally frowned upon and unappreciated.

Subject Headers may be easy to overlook, but, this can cause trouble. A reply of "I agree" with no subject header sent days (or even hours) after the initial mail can be confusing. What do you agree with? People can also reply to side threads and secondary issues while keeping the subject such as "Permit Parking" while the topic of the message is something about Pretzel Park. This is just plain confusing. So, try your best to make your headers conform to the message you're posting.

Virus Alerts and hoaxes are continuously floating around the internet, such as warnings about the nonexistant Good Times virus (which was never true), pleas to send cards to Craig Shergold (which was true many years ago but is no longer relevant) and a cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus (which was never true). If you receive e-mail that's supposed to be redistributed to other people, please send a few copies to people you know asking if it's true before redistributing it to lists of thousands of people.

More Information

• Netiquette at albion.com
• Wikipedia