Mailing list guidelines

Revision as of 09:42, 4 February 2011

Before You Start

Please remember that when you are posting to a community mailing list, you are in effect asking a large group of people to give you some of their time and attention - to download your message, read it, and potentially reply to it. It is simply polite to ensure that your message is relevant to as many of the people receiving the message as possible. All of these guidelines stem from this basic principle.

• Read the Community_communication document: Do not post without reviewing this document.
• Search for existing answers: Believe it or not, your question might not be new - do a thorough search to see if it has been answered before.
• Post in the right place: Review the Community_communication document and make sure that you are posting in the right place for your topic.

Posting Guidelines

Be Nice

Be courteous and polite to fellow members in the list:

• Keep the language clean (no swearing)
• Respect other people: No regional, racial, gender or other abuse will be tolerated.

Keep it Legal

Make sure that you have the legal right to post your content and are not violating copyright or other laws.

Stay on Topic

Do not post threads to the wrong mailing list or post off-topic. Review the Community_communication document to make sure that you are posting in the right place for your topic.

Keep It Short

Remember that thousands of copies of your message will exist in mailboxes:

• Keep your messages as short as possible.
• Avoid including log output (select only the most relevant lines, or place the log on a website or in a pastebin instead)
• Don't excessively quote previous messages in the thread (trim the quoted text down to the most recent/relevant messages only).

Use Proper Posting Style

• No HTML or Rich Text: Set your mailer to send only plain text messages to avoid getting caught in our spam filters.
• Do not top post: Top posting is replying to a message on "top" of the quoted text of the previous correspondence. This is highly unwanted in mailing lists because it increases the size of the daily digests to be sent out & is highly confusing and incoherent. By default, most email clients top post. Please, remove the irrelevant part of the previous communication(in case of more than a single correspondence) and use bottom, interleaved posting.
• Using interleaved posting: Bottom, interleaved posting is replying to the relevant parts of the previous correspondence just below the block(s) of sentences. For a comment to another block of sentences of the same quoted text, you should move below that relevant block again. Do not reply below the whole of the quoted text. Also remove any irrelevant text.
• Use links: Please provide URLs to articles wherever possible. Avoid cutting and pasting whole articles especially considering the fact that all may not be interested.
• Don't include attached files: Instead of including attached files, please upload your file to the MeeGo wiki and post a link to the file from your email message.

Do Not Hijack Threads

Post new questions or new topics as new threads (new email message). Please do not reply to a random thread with a new question or start an unrelated topic of conversation in an existing thread. This creates confusion and makes it much less likely that you will get a response.

Do Not Cross Post

Avoid posting to multiple lists simultaneously. Pick a mailing list that is most suitable for your post and just use that. CC'ing multiple lists should be avoided.

Subscribers Only

Only subscribers can post to our mailing lists. If you would like to contribute to our mailing lists, we think it is only fair that you be a subscriber. Please note that if you want to participate only occasionally, you can subscribe to a list and set your email options to digest or no mail and read the web archives when you want to catch up. Some of the MeeGo lists are archived on gmane.org. gmane's web and news interface can be used to reply to archived emails without breaking the email thread.

Recipients

Do not include more than 10 other recipients in the To: or CC: fields when you post to the mailing list. This triggers the spam filter, and your message will most likely be discarded by the mailing list software.

Always group-reply to an message (minding the less than 10 other recipients rule above). Some of the email recipients might not be subscribed, might have turned off email delivery, or may read list messages with lower priority than messages addressed to them directly. For the same reasons it is advisable to add relevant people to the recipient list explicitly.

Guideline Violations

See our process for dealing with violations for more details.

Requesting a New Mailing List

Keep in mind that we already have many mailing lists, so new lists need to be justified. Sending a request that has nothing more that "please create mailing list x for me" will not be approved without additional justification.

Before you request a new list

• You must commit to posting to it regularly (daily or several times a week).
• Review all of our existing mailing lists. Is there any way that you can use one of our existing lists to collaborate on your project?
• Think about the upstream lists. Most of the MeeGo components are based on upstream projects. Can you use the upstream infrastructure?

Some questions that will need answers when requesting a new list

If you still think you require a new list, you will need to answer the following questions:

• Why do you need this list?
• Who will be using this list? Specific teams and names of people committed to using it.
• Who can be a co-owner of the list? This should be someone technical who is involved in the day to day working of the project.
• Why are all of the the existing lists unsuitable for your project?
• If it relates to an upstream project:
  • Is there a reason you need a MeeGo list and aren't using the upstream infrastructure?
  • How do you you plan to use this list to contribute back to the upstream project and how will the two activities relate to each other?

How to make the request

• Post a message to the MeeGo mailing list that you have been using for prior discussions to get feedback on your idea for a new mailing list. If this is a new topic, post your message to MeeGo-dev for platform development projects or MeeGo-community for anything else. If possible, include answers to the questions above in your mailing list post.
• Collect feedback for at least two full business days.

If you still want to proceed after collecting feedback on the mailing list:

• File a new bug in bugs.meego.com, Classification: MeeGo Community Infrastructure, Product: lists.meego.com. Direct link: https://bugs.meego.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=lists.meego.com. Choose Component: General.
• Include in the bug description a link to the mailing list thread from the archives.
• Include answers to the questions above.

List naming

• All MeeGo mailing list names will start with "MeeGo-".

Additional Resources

• Mailing list guidelines by Shakthi Kannan (PDF): Great guideline summary and examples of posting styles.

Acknowledgements

Credit to the Fedora Mailing List Guidelines as a starting point under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.