1. Make sure your email program marks quoted parts of messages you are responding to with the standards-compliant > (greater than) sign at the beginning of every line. Delete all irrelevant quoted parts and add your answer *after* anything necessary to understand your response. Remember, others spend a lot of their free time helping you, and it is rude towards them and others if they have to spend a lot of time looking for your answer, reading irrelevant old parts, or jumping back and forth between your answer and the original to see what you mean. For example, "No, that's not what i meant" is an incomprehensible way of writing a message if the quoted original *part* (*not* the whole message) does not come first.
2. Use descriptive subject headers when posting. Remember, others spend a lot of their free time helping you, and it shows a minimum of respect towards them and others that their efforts are easily found later in the archive too. Instead of subjects like "Firefox" or "help me!!!" or "CD-drive", use "switching from IE to Firefox" or "Windows XP won't start" or "CD drive dead" etc.
3. If you start talking about a new topic, change the subject header, but do *not* start more than one discussion (thread) on one problem. This means that if your problem has not been resolved, you should *not* use a new subject header.
4. In case you have an urgent problem, you can add ASAP to the *beginning* of the subject header.
5. Mark all off-topic contributions by adding OT to the *beginning* of the subject or by clearly marking such a section in an otherwise serious post, at least if the OT section is long. In case your contribution is only off topic in the sense that it doesn't concern the OP (original poster) but pertinent to the topic, it's important to write "Hi John" to let the OP know s/he doesn't have to read this. Remember that people fighting with computer problems are easily frustrated when they feel they're being ignored by a part of the discussion that is or seems to be irrelevant or too technical.
6. Don't tell others what kind of messages they shouldn't post. This should only be done in extreme cases of abuse and only in private messages. Since this is a moderated list, it is best to ask the moderators privately to (privately) contact those you feel are misbehaving. Public reprimands always do more harm than good (list atmosphere!) and aren't even effective against reckless offenders. As long as off-topic conversations are labeled OT, there is usually no need to try to prevent them, on the contrary. Remember that we are all human and need to fool around too in order to also be productive. (All work and no play...)
7. If you feel a discussion is uninteresting, ignore it. Most hard disks are so large nowadays that it's not necessary to delete unwanted messages you receive from mailing lists (as long as they all go into a separate folder and don't fill up your inbox). It's easy to find what you're looking for using your email program's search function, and the time you spend deleting messages is more or less wasted. You may however want to use your program's filter function to automatically delete all messages marked OT (off-topic) or all messages in a thread that is getting on your nerves.
8. If you don't have time to read all messages, read the newest ones first. If you instead respond to older ones in the same thread, this can confuse the discussion and even cause a lot of harm to the person looking for help.

Commonly used abbreviations and terms (jargon)

• - (topic) thread: discussion (a string of consecutive message postings to a newsgroup, mailing list, or Internet forum)
• * AFAICS: as far as I can see
• * AFAIK: as far as I know
• * ASAP: as soon as possible
• * BTW: by the way
• * FWIW: for what it's worth
• * IANAL: I am not a lawyer
• * IIRC: if I recall correctly
• * IMHO: in my humble/honest opinion. Derived from IMO (or vice-versa)
• * LOL: laugh out loud
• * NP: no problem * OT: off topic
• * OP: original poster (whoever started the thread)
• * OTOH: on the other hand
• * ROFL: rolling on floor laughing
• * TIA: thanks in advance
• * TY: thank you
• * YW: You're welcome

Places to look for help