Re: "Finding" www-html (was: Flash)

On Sun, 17 Dec 2000, phillip lyford wrote:

> Is it possible that the etiquette/rules is/are not clear?

No.  What isn't "clear" is that there *are* rules and etiquette on the
'net - that newcomers are well advised to acquaint themselves with,
*before* gunning their throttles on the infobahn.  

> or delivered in a way that not ALL people can understand it/them?

My SWAG is that the people trying to get themselves off the list never
read the page(s) that would have told them how to.

  http://www.w3.org/Mail/

This has a link (if there's something clearer than "How To Subscr*be 
or Unsubscr*be", could someone offer such an alternative?) to

  http://www.w3.org/Mail/Request

where the very first sentence is:

 All mailing list administrativia MUST be sent to a *-request address
 (per RFC2142), never to the list itself.

So, the reasonable hypothesis is that these people did *not* read
this.  Which raises the question: then how did they get on the list to
begin with?  And the answer seems to be: some bogotic RTFM-challenged
"service" did it for them, automatically.  As Dan and the rest of us
surmise, they just clicked on something somewhere, not realizing that
they were not being done a favor.

> Why not revisit the etiquette/rules to make it easier for people to 
> interpret/understand them.

More and more I'm coming to appreciate the relatively abrupt style
characteristic of *useful* introductions to being a good netizen.  It
gets the essential message across, with a minimum of fuss - that the
'net is for people who understand responsibility and RTFM.  For
instance, consider this apophthegm:

  The Internet is full.  Go away.

It has a koan quality that ultimately does make things easier to
understand and/or interpret.  But, of course, YMMV;)


Arjun

-- 
NETSCAPISM /net-'sca-,pi-z*m/ n (1995): habitual diversion of the mind
  to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from
  the realization that the Internet was built by and for someone else.
                                                  -- Erik Naggum

Received on Sunday, 17 December 2000 00:53:49 UTC