Mailing List Guidelines

Every volunteer project obtains its strength from the people involved in it. Mailing lists provide a simple and effective communication mechanism.

You are welcome to join any of our mailing lists (or all of them if you wish). You can choose to lurk, or actively participate. It's up to you.

Before you join these lists, you should make sure that you read and follow the guidelines below.

Do your best to respect the charter of the mailing list
There are three types of lists that you can join:

  • The User list is where you should send questions and comments about configuration, setup, usage and other "user" types of questions.
  • The Developer list is where you should should send questions and comments about the actual software source code and general "development" types of questions.
  • The Commit list is used for tracking committer activity in the project's CVS repository. This list is used for informational purposes only. Please do not post messages to this list. Questions regarding activity on this list should be posted on the Developer list.

Join the lists that are appropriate for your discussion
Please make sure that you are joining the list that is appropriate for the topic or product that you would like to discuss.

Do not abuse resources in order to get help
Asking your configuration or user type of question on the developers list because you think that you will get help more quickly by going directly to the developers instead of to the user base is not very nice. Chances are that doing this will actually prevent people from answering your question because it is clear that you are trying to abuse resources.

Avoid sending HTML or "Stylized" email to the list
Do your best to ensure that you are not sending HTML or "Stylized" email to the list. If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express or Eudora, chances are that you are sending HTML email by default. There is usually a setting that will allow you to send "Plain Text" email. If you are using Microsoft products to send email, there are several bugs in the software that prevent you from turning off the sending of HTML email.

Watch where you are sending email
The majority of our mailing lists have set the Reply-To to go back to the list. That means that when you Reply to a message, it will go to the list and not to the original author directly. The reason is because it helps facilitate discussion on the list for everyone to benefit from. Be careful of this as sometimes you may intend to reply to a message directly to someone instead of the entire list.

Do not crosspost messages
In other words, pick a mailing list and send your messages to that mailing list only. Do not send your messages to multiple mailing lists. The reason is that people may be subscribed to one list and not to the other. Therefore, some people may only see half of the conversation.