The topic of "mailing list etiquette" came up at the last Core Workgroup meeting and I took the "action item" to raise the topic, and remind folks about proper etiquette for an open community mailing list like this. I looked around for some existing guidelines and found none that were just right, so I write up some of my own guidelines
* Correct Subject. Use an accurate and descriptive subject for your email messages and when the topic of conversation changes in a thread, then please change the subject to match. * Preserve the thread. When responding to a message on the mailing list make sure you respond directly to that message. Don't start a new thread to respond and don't reply to a digest message, because that will split the thread of conversation. * Do not participate via Digest. If you intend to participate in mailing list conversations, then do not subscribe to the digest list. Responding to digest emails does not preserve threads of conversation. * Post in plain text. Configure your email client send plain text emails to the mailing list and no rich text or HTML. If you need pretty colors and formatting to get your point across then create a wiki page. * Prevent out-of-office replies. Make sure your email client does not send out-of-office or on-vacation emails to the mailing list. One item that I did not mention was "top-posting" which is a good practice for some and an anti-pattern for others. I'm not sure we need to mandate top or bottom posting. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style Eventually, I would like to promote this set of rules to the wiki. What do folks think? Is this a worthwhile start? What have a left out? Thanks, Dave
