To everyone:
Charlie Bernhardt wrote:
>
> Thanks to those who responded to my post on Feb. 4. I'm wondering why the responses
>came to me via e-mail, rather than being posted to the group, so others might find
>help also with this type of problem. But I appreciate the help, regardless of how it
>comes to me.
The reason is that we are trying to get people to collect
responses privately, and then sort them out and post a summary,
so that the result is more useable to future readers.
When someone asks a question, people should respond directly to
the person with the answers (unless they wish to expand or
clarify the scope to perhaps get more people into the process).
After response dies down (a day or so to about a week), the
person who asked should do his or her best to compose a summary
of answers. Read that as "a summary", not necessarily a
concatenation of all unedited responses. Consider how people
searching the archives in the future are likely to try to find
this info, so you should make sure all the relevant keywords are
in your summary someplace. And please try to compose as neatly as
possible, using some punctuation occasionally and a
spell-checker. Get rid of broken lines in quoted material and
remove other forms of email marsh gas like sigs, vcards, =20's,
and HTML twaddle. Plain text is still best for summaries, because
everyone can easily read plain text, but I suppose some people
will have to have their keyboards pried loose from their cold,
dead hands before they will give up multi-media messaging!
This list is getting too busy for everyone to always post all
messages to everyone, every time. Summaries tend to reduce
redundancy and also offer the opportunity to rearrange answers so
that the best are summarized first. By preceding the subject line
with "SUM:" or "Summary:" the message gets obviously flagged as
"a better nugget of info than usual." However, that said, the
practice of doing summaries is just a guideline. It's proved to
be a good idea on other busy lists, and I can tell you that when
you're searching list archives for answers, seeing those
summaries really helps!
If you (and I mean any yous out there) can't do a summary, or
just don't have time, then don't. But if you get a reputation for
being "one-way" by not doing summaries, then you can expect to
not get too many answers to your future questions.
- Bill Thoen
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