wolfnose.org
/ fur
/ usenet
/ guidelines.html
Much, and I do mean much, has been written on the subject of
correct posting ettiquet. Most of it has focused on correct
behaviour for technical groups, and isn't entirely
appropriate for a social group like
alt.lifestyle.furry. Some of the classics are:
When you follow up to someone else's post, your news client should indent the original article, often using '>' character at the beginning of each line. It should also give the name of the original poster at the start. Something like this:
David Cooke wrote:
>
> Hope you have fun here on a.l.f!
You would then begin writing your reply at the end of the text. If your newsreader does not do this you will want to adjust its setup until it does. Use a test group if you want to make sure.
If the post you are repling to is long, then it is best to
delete the material that is not relevant. Keep the lines that
show who wrote what, unless you have deleted all the text
that someone wrote. It is important not to change the meaning
of the original text when doing this though, particularly if
tempers are raised or the issue is contentious. Some like to
add a tag like snip just to make it clear where
material has been deleted.
Most newsreaders allow you to automatically include a few lines of text at the end of your post. This was originally intended to provide contact information such as telephone numbers, and (before the advent of domain names) e-mail routing information.
You do not want to include your telephone number on a Usenet post. You can use the facility to include other material: your furcode, a witty text, a link to your website, and so on. Try to keep your signature short: four lines or fewer. This four line limit has a history that goes back to days when network bandwidth was a lot more expensive than it is today, but it is a good ballpark limit. Go over the limit and you risk annoying people.
The signature part should be separated from the main part of
a post by a line that has just the three characters
"-- " (dash, dash, space) on it. The newsreader
normally puts this in automatically, but some require that
you type it into the signature file yourself.
No one is obliged to read anything you post to Usenet. Often other people have limited time to read the group, and will skip over things that are awkward or difficult to read. It follows that if you want to maximise the number of readers it is worth taking some time to make your post easy to read.
Netscape Communicator and other browser integrated clients offer the option of posting with HTML formatting. This is very hard to read on an ordinary news client, so you should normally keep this feature turned off.
Most news clients default to a width of 80 characters to match the capabilities of the VDUs that were the most common way to interact with computers when Usenet was being developed. The 80 column width was not arbritary; it allows around seven or eight words per line, which is optimum for easy reading. You will find a similar number of words in a line from a novel.
While you might be able to resize the window of your news client to get more text on a line, what you post will often look downright ugly on someone elses screen; and when it looks ugly people don't bother to read. Some newsreaders can be configured to automatically break lines at a given point, some will appear to do this, but send the text as one long line. Test out your news client to see how it behaves. One surefire way to format is to press the return key at the end of each line, rather than at the end of each paragraph as you might do in a word processor.
Don't go right up to the 80th character either. If you do this as soon as someone posts a followup it will go over the line length. As a rule of thumb end each line before the 72nd character. This leaves plenty of space for follow ups.
White space aids readability - its as simple as that. Break your text up into paragraphs, leave a blank line between the previous poster's text and your own.
Don't worry about how your articles look. Remember it's the message that counts, not the way it's presented. Ignore the fact that sloppy spelling in a purely written forum sends out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience.
Emily Postnews - [Templeton]
Perhaps more seriously, "inventive" spellings make things harder to read, and the harder it is to read, the fewer will read it. If your news client includes a spell checker, then consider using it. If not, put a dictionary next to your keyboard, or install one - you never know, you might learn something.
On the other hand, it is not good form to nit-pick over spelling errors. Some have genuine problems with spelling, others will have learnt English as a second language. Even the English and Americans can't agree over the spelling of a simple word like "colour".
There are two ways you can make your thoughts known about a post: to follow-up with a another post to Usenet, or to reply by conventional e-mail. Both have their merits. A follow-up will be seen by everyone, and is a good idea if the stuff you are about to post could be of interest to everyone. An e-mail reply will only be seen by the poster, and may allow you to be alot more open than you might be in a public forum.
Someone has just posted a deeply meaningful and heartfelt article that has a straight line you just can't resist. Resist. Sit on your hands. Whatever you do, don't follow up with your witty reply. No matter how side-splittingly funny it might be, the original author is likely to be very offended.
Its all too easy, once you've made friends with others on the group, to use the group to talk about anything and everything. Afterall, all your on-line friends are there. The problem with this is that the group traffic balloons, and individuals with other commitments such as jobs and family are cut out of discussing their furriness, which is afterall what the group is for.
While there are certain things that are explicitly off-topic
(like artwork, comics) on alt.lifestyle.furry,
this doesn't mean that talk about programming, web-design, or
the Linux operating system are on topic. Indeed there are
other, better, forums for discussing these things.
Conventional wisdom has it that posting so called "me too" articles: a follow up to a post which says nothing other than agree with the original author, have little value and should not be posted. This is particularly true when the whole of the original post was quoted first.
There are times, however, when this is very useful on a
social group like alt.lifestyle.furry. If
someone posts something personal or insightful and other furs
think "yeah, me too", but post nothing then the original
author will feel alone or ignored. Remember to quote
sparingly though!