I added this to the Wiki. Feel free to go there and make it better.
Be Polite - Be Helpful
Different people have different levels of skills. Some people are very
familiar with Exim and some aren't. What is obvious to one person might
not be obvious to someone else.
Comments like RTFM are neither polite or helpful. Most of the time if
someone is asking a question they already checke the manual and didn't
find the solution or didn't understand the solution. Maybe they were
looking to solve a problem but didn't know the correct Exim terminology
to find what they were looking for.
Sometimes the manual is incomplete or incomplete from the prespective of
someone who is not intimately familiar with Exim. Sometimes the examples
given don't apply to the user's situation. Often the same command when
used in a filter has a completely different syntax when used in an ACL.
Sometime a command works in one ACL and not another.
Exim is an extremely complex and full featured MTA with thousands of
commands. It takes a lot of effort to fully learn what it can do. So
even if something is in the manual doesn't mean that it's easilly found.
Telling someone RTFM not only angers the person asking the question, but
also irritates all the other list members who ar exposed to unproductive
weirdness. If your message isn't contributing in some positive way to
solving an issue then thee's no reason to inject insults into the process.
One thing to remember is that open source projects are also a community
of people. People should treat each other with respect. We were all
Newbies at some point. And we all asks stupid questions from time to
time. Sometimes people get frustrated and angry wondering "why doesn't
this damn thing just work" or they are under a lot of pressure because
email is down and people are screaming and all they want to do is get a
question answered so they can get email back online. So when we are
helpful and considerate we all come out ahead. When we are rude and
abusive it make the community look like we all are morons.
Feature Requests and other Suggestions
Be respectful of other people when they make feature requests and
suggestions. Just because you don't need the feature doesn't mean that
everyone else is like you. If the feature is already there you can
politely point that out. Even though 9 out of 10 feature requests are
not worth doing the 1 out of 10 that is really helps advance Exim for
all of us. So attacking someone who makes a suggestion hurts everyone
because it makes people not want to be helpful and it sets a negative
tone that drives good people away.
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