LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Andrew Reid <andrew.reid@plug.cx>
  To  : <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: 30 Jun 2001 22:15:39 +0930

How to get best results from LinuxSA

There's been a lot of talk on the subject of HTML email, list etiquette
etc. Since I was one of those who suggested we takeup something like
"... FreeBSD Questions has, thanks to Greg Lehey...", I thought I'd make
something of it and nut out what -I- think is appropriate.

Being a subscriber of FreeBSD Questions, I receive the regular mailings
from Greg with his suggestions on "how to get the best results from
LinuxSA". With that in mind, I've taken a lot from that message and
converted it appropriately. Thanks goes to Greg for his efforts in
making the FreeBSD Questions list a nicer place[1].

This is still has a few holes the need patching up (in the form of
FIXME:'s where I didn't have the resources on me to fix them). I'd be
happy to accept contributions that cover those holes.

How to get the best results from LinuxSA.
=========================================

Last update 30 June 2001

This is a regular posting to the LinuxSA mailing list. If you received
it in reply to a message you sent, it probably means the sender thinks
that at least one of the following things was wrong with your message:

- You left out a subject line, or the subject line was not appropriate.
- You formatted it in such a way that it was difficult to read.
- You asked more than one unrelated question in one message.
- You sent out a message with an incorrect date, time or time zone.
- You sent out the same message more than once.
- You sent an 'unsubscribe' message to LinuxSA.

If you have done more than one of these things, there is a good chance
that you will receive more than one copy of this message from different
people. Read on, and your next message will be more successful.

This document is maintained by Andrew Reid <andrew.reid@plug.cx>. It was
"inspired", and in many sections blatently copied from Greg Lehey's "How
to get best results from FreeBSD-questions" document, available from
http://www.lemis.com/questions.html.

This document can also be accessed online, in plain text format from
http://www.plug.cx/linuxsa.txt.

Contents:

I: Introduction
II: How to unsubscribe from LinuxSA
III: How to submit a question to LinuxSA
IV: How to follow up a question to LinuxSA
IV: How to answer a question to LinuxSA

I: Introduction
===============

This is a regular posting aimed to help both those seeking advice from
LinuxSA (the "newcommers"), and also those who answer the questions (the
"hackers").

Note that the term hacker has nothing to do with breaking into
other people's computers.  The correct term for the latter
activity is "cracker", but the popular press hasn't found out
yet.  The LinuxSA hackers disapprove strongly of cracking 
security, and have nothing to do with it.

In the past, there has been some friction which stems from the different
viewpoints of the two groups.  The newcommers accused the hackers of
being arrogant, stuck-up, and unhelpful, while the hackers accused the
newcommers of being stupid, unable to read plain English, and expecting
everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. Of course, there's
an element of truth in both of these claims, but for the most part these
viewpoints come from a sense of frustration.

In this document, I'd like to do something to relieve this frustration
and help everyone get better results from LinuxSA. In the following
section, I recommend how to submit a question; after that, we'll look at
how to answer one.

II: How to unsubscribe from LinuxSA
===================================

When you subscribed to LinuxSA, you got a welcome message from
linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au.  In this message, amongst other things,
it told you how to unsubscribe.  Here's a typical message:

FIXME: Find a subscription message and copy the appropriate bits
here.

Generally, unsubscribing from LinuxSA is a trivial task and takes only a
few seconds of your time. In fact, the process is so short and simple,
the instructions are included at the bottom of each message sent to
linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au:

To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
 mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the
 subject

If SmartList replies and tells you (incorrectly) that you're not on the
list, this may mean one of two things:

 1. You have changed your mail ID since you subscribed.  That's
where keeping the original message from SmartList comes in
handy. For example, the sample message above shows my mail ID as
andrew@plug.cx. Since then, I have changed it to
andrew.reid@plug.cx. Mail for andrew@plug.cx gets shunted to
andrew.reid@plug.cx, so asking SmartList to remove
"andrew.reid@plug.cx" from the list is going to fail, seeing as
it is not subscribed. By changing your "From" address in my mail
client's configuration to " andrew@plug.cx" and sending the
unsubscribe request again, you should be more successful.

 2. You're subscribed to a mailing list which is subscribed to
LinuxSA. If that's the case, you'll have to figure out which one
it is and get your name taken off that one. If you're not sure
which one it might be, check the headers of the messages you
receive from LinuxSA: maybe there's a clue there.

If you've done all this, and you still can't figure out what's going on,
send a message to postmaster@linuxsa.org.au, and he will sort things out
for you. Don't send a message to LinuxSA: they can't help you.

III: How to submit a question to LinuxSA
========================================

When submitting a question to LinuxSA, consider the following points:

 1. Remember that nobody gets paid for answering a Linux question.
They do it of their own free will. You can influence this free
will positively by submitting a well-formulated question
supplying as much relevant information as possible. You can
influence this free will negatively by submitting an incomplete,
illegible, or rude question. It's perfectly possible to send a
message to LinuxSA and not get an answer even if you follow
these rules. It's much more possible not to get an answer if you
don't. In the rest of this document, we'll look at how to get
the most out of your question to LinuxSA.

 2. Not everybody who answers Linux questions reads every message:
they look at the subject line and decide whether it interests
them. Clearly, it's in your interest to specify a subject.
"Linux problem" or "Help" aren't enough. If you provide no
subject at all, many people won't bother reading it. If your
subject isn't specific enough, the people who can answer it may
not read it.

 3. Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DON'T
SHOUT!!!!!. We appreciate that a lot of people don't speak
English as their first language, and we try to make allowances
for that, but it is really painful to try and read a message
written full of typos or without line breaks. A lot of badly
formatted messages come from bad mailers of badly configured
mailers. The following mailers are known to send out badly
formatted messages without you finding out about them:

Eudora
exmh
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Internet Mail
Microsoft Outlook
Netscape

As you can see, the mailers in the Microsoft world are frequent
offenders. If at all possible, use a UNIX mailer. If you must
use a mailer under Microsoft environments, make sure its set up 
correctly. Correctly can be defined as:

 - Set to send in PLAIN TEXT and NOT HTML or RICH TEXT.
 - Set to wrap outgoing text at 72 characters.
 - Set NOT to use MIME: a lot of people use mailers which don't
   get on very well with MIME.

For further information on this subject, check out
http://www.lemis.com/email.html.

 4. Make sure your time and time zone are set correctly. This may
seem a little silly, since your message still gets there, but
many of the people who you are trying to reach get several
hundred messages a day. They frequently sort the incomming
messages by subject and date, and if your message doesn't come
before the first answer, they may assume they missed it and not
bother to look.

 5. Don't include unrelated questions in the same message. Firstly,
a long message tends to scare people off, and secondly, it's
more difficuly to get all the people who can answer all the
questions to read the message.

 6. Specify as much information as possible. This is a difficult 
area, and we need to expand on what information you need to
submit, but here's a start:

 If you get error messages, don't say "I get error messages",
 say (for example), "I get the error message 'No route to
 host'".

 If your system panics, don't say "My system panicked", say
 (for example) "My system panicked with the message "free vnode
 isn't".

 If you have difficulty installing Linux, please be sure to
 tell us the following things:

   - The distribution (ie, RedHat) and the version (ie, 7.1).
   - The hardware you have. In particular, it's important to
     know the IRQs and I/O addresses of the boards installed in
     your machine.

 If you have difficulty getting PPP to run, describe the
 configuration. Which version of PPP do you use? What kind of
 authentication do you have? Do you have a static or dynamic IP
 address? What kind of messages do you get in the log file?
 What is the version of the kernel you are running (the command
 'uname -a' (without the quotes) will give you that
 information.

 7. If you don't get an answer immediately, or if you don't even see
your own message appear on the list immediately, don't resend
the message. Wait at least 24 hours. The LinuxSA mailer takes a
little while to distribute the emails to the subscribees. Once
the message does get through, the person who might know the
answer may not be at his desk and not able to answer the email.

 8. If you do all this, and you still get no answer, there could be
other reasons. For example, the problem is so compilcated that
nobody knows the answer, or the person who does know the answer
is offline. If you don't get an answer after, say, a week, it
might help to resend the message. If you don't get an answer to
your second message, though, your're probably not going to get
one from this forum. Resending the same message again and again
will only make you unpopular.

 9. Keep your question on-topic. This is a Linux list, so don't go
asking people what breed of dog you should buy, what mobile
phone is best or where the cheapeset fuel is today. It's not
appropriate here. That said, if it can somehow be related to
Linux, it's probably going to be received well.

Examples of questions that aren't directly Linux-related but are
generally accepted as "OK" are:

 - "What hardware should I buy for my Linux machine?"
 - "Telstra have tried to screw us again, can they do that?"
 - "XYZ Unix Application isn't working. <!-- Necessary details
   ommitted -->. Can someone suggest a way to get it working?"
 - "Microsoft is saying evil things about the way the Linux
    world works. Do they have any factual basis for such
    comments?"

To summarize, let's assume you know the answer to the following question
(yes, it's the same on in each case :-). You choose which of these two
questions you would be more prepared to answer:

Message 1:
Subject: (none)

I just can't get hits damn silly Kinxu system to workd, amd Im really
good at tsis stuff, but i have never seen antyhing sho difficult to
intsll, it jsut wont owrk whateer I try so whty dont y9ou guts tell me
what i doing wrong.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Message 2:
Subject: Problems installing RedHat Linux 7.2

I've just got the RedHat Linux 7.2 CD-ROM from NetCraft, and I'm having
a lot of difficulty installing it. I have a 66 MHz 486 with 16MB of
memory and an Adaptec 1540A SCSI board, a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball disk
and a Toshiba 3501XA CD-ROM drive. The installation works just fine, but
when I try to reboot the system, I get the message "Missing Operating
System".

------------------------------------------------------------------------

IV: How to follow up a question to LinuxSA
==========================================

Often you will want to send in additional information to a question you
have already sent. The best way to do this is to reply to your original
message. This has three advantages:

 1. You include the original message text, so people will know what
you're talking about. Don't forget to trim the unnecessary text
out though.

 2. The text in the subject line stays the same (you did remember to
put one in, didn't you?). Many mailers will sort messages by
subject. This helps group messages together.

 3. The message reference numbers in the header will refer to the
previous message. Some mailers, such as mutt, can thread
messages, showing the exact relationships between the messages.

V: How to answer a quetsion to LinuxSA
======================================

Before you answer a question to LinuxSA, consider:

 1. A lot of the points on submitting questions also apply to
answering questions. Read them.

 2. Has somebody already answered the question? The easiest way to
check this is to sort your incomming mail by subject: then
(hopefully) you'll see the question followed by any answers, all
together.

If somebody has already answered it, it doesn't automatically
mean that you shouldn't send another answer. But it makes sense
to read all the other answers first.

 3. Do you have something to contribute beyond what has already
been said? In general, "Yeah, me too" answers don't help much,
although there are exceptions, like when somebody is describing
a problem he's having, and he doesn't know whether there's
something wrong with the hardware or software.  If you do send a
"me too" answer, you should also include any further relevant
information.

 4. Are you sure you understand the question? Very frequently, the
person who asks the question is confused and doesn't express
himself very well. Even with the best understanding of the
system, it's easy to send a reply which doesn't answer the
question. This doesn't help: you'll heave the person who
submitted the question more frustrated or confused than ever. If
nobody else answers, and your not too sure either, you can
always ask for more information.

 5. Are you sure you answer is correct? If not, wait a day or so. If
nobody else comes up with a better answer, you can still reply
and say, for example, "I don't know if this is correct, but
since nobody else has replied, why don't you try replacing your
ATAPI CD-ROM with a frog?".

 6. Unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, reply to the
sender and LinuxSA. Many people on the LinuxSA list are
"lurkers": they learn by reading messages sent and replied to by
others. If you take a message which is of general interest off
the list, you're depriving these people of their information. Be
careful with hundreds of CCs. If this is the case, be sure to
trim the Cc: lines appropriately.

 7. Include relevant text from the original message. Trim it to the
minimum, but don't overdo it. It should still be possible for
somebody who didn't read the original message to understand what
your're talking about.

 8. Use some technique to identify which text came from the original
message, and which text you add. I personally find that
prepending "> " to the original message works best. Leaving
whitespace after the "> " and leave empty lines between your
text and the original text both make the result more readable.

 9. Put your response in the correct place (after the text to which
it replies). It's very difficult to read a thread of responses
where each reply comes before the text to which it replies.

 10. Most mailers change the subject line on a reply by prepending a
text such as "Re: ". If you're mailer doesn't do it
automatically, you should do it manually.

 11. If the submitter didn't abide by formatting conventions (lines
too long, HTML/RTF, innapropriate subject line), please fix it.
In the case of an incorrect subject line (such as "HELP!!??"),
change the subject line to (say) "Re: Difficulties with sync PPP
(was: HELP!!??)". That way other people trying to follow the
thread will have less difficulty following it.

In such cases, it's appropriate to say what you did and why you
did it, but try not to be rude. If you find you can't answer
without being rude, don't answer.

If you just want to reply to a message because of its bad
format, just reply to the submitter, not to the list. You can
just send him this message in reply, if you like.


<---- Snip here.

Please let me know what you think. If there are no objections to the
principle in general, I'll set a deadline of Wednesday, 5 July 2001 for
submissions for changes.

As of Thursday, 6 July 2001, this email (in its current or modified
form) will be sent out on a monthly basis to linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au by a
CRON job on one of my servers.

Now, rather than attaching this message (or its successors) to the
welcome message, I think a link to http://www.plug.cx/linuxsa.txt would
be more fitting. People with differing opinions are encouraged to "put
their case forward".

  - andrew

[1] Thanks, Greg for taking the time to think this out. It is apprecated
and actually seems to work. I believe that this approach can work for us
too.

--
void signature () {
	cout << "Andrew Reid -- andrew.reid@plug.cx" << endl ;
	cout << "Cell: +61 401 946 813" << endl;
	cout << "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur" << endl;
}

-- 
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