Wednesday, October 03, 2007

How to have your emails ignored

Posted by Mark Proctor
As the Drools mailing list volume increases I thought I'd make a tongue in cheek etiquette guide to go on the mailing lists info page, http://labs.jboss.com/drools/lists.html. We aren't really that formal or strict yet, but hopefully it will help keep the traffic noise down as we grow. Feed back welcome :)

How to have your emails ignored:
  1. Start the email with "URGENT"
  2. Tell everyone how desparate you and how you need an immediate response for your really important project.
  3. Don't wait a minimum of 3 days and resend your email within minutes of hours.
  4. Send emails directly to mailing list members, especially the developers.
  5. Paste pages of code and then say "it doesn't work, please help".
  6. Paste a long stack trace and say "it doesn't work, please help".
  7. Start your email with "please sirs" or include "do the needful".
  8. Ask dumb questions that are in the manual.
  9. Ask basic java questions.
  10. Ask questions about JRules
  11. Reply to an existing thread but starting a new topic
  12. Start your email with "I'm a member of the drools mailinglist, so please answer me"
  13. General begging and pleading
  14. Say some thing to the effect of "Please tell me how I can call a function on the LHS. (hurry my assignment is due today!)"
at 5:28 pm
Labels:

1 comment:

  1. I think a section on tips and tricks for positive stuff could help too.

    For example:

    - many people try to avoid getting spammed by dozens of daily mailing list mails by not using the user list and contacting someone directly. This isn't just inefficient, but also solvable: just use nabble.com or the newsgroup server news.gmane.org.

    - People tend to complain about the documentation or design being bad, but fail to point out where exactly it's bad so it can be improved.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)