Posting Guidelines for the Ruby-Talk Mailing List

You should follow these guidelines when posting to the ruby-talk mailing list.

  1. Always be friendly, considerate, tactful, and tasteful. We want to keep this list hospitable to the growing ranks of newbies, very young people, and their teachers, as well as cater to fire breathing wizards. :-)

  2. Keep your content relevant and easy to follow. Try to keep your content brief and to the point, but also try to include all relevant information.

    1. The general format guidelines (aka Netiquette) are matters of common sense and common courtesy that make life easier for third parties to follow along (in real time or when perusing archives):

      • Please note: Include quoted text from previous posts before your responses and selectively quote as much as is relevant.
      • Use plain text; don’t use HTML, RTF, or Word. Most email programs have an option for this; if yours doesn’t, get a (free) program or use a web-based service that does.
      • Include examples from files as in-line text; don’t use attachments.

    2. If reporting a problem, give all the relevant information the first time; this isn’t the psychic friends newsgroup. :-)

      When appropriate, include:

      • an example (preferably simple) that produces the problem
      • the actual error messages
      • the version of Ruby (ruby -v)
      • the OS type and version (uname -a)
      • the compiler name and version used to build Ruby

  3. Make the subject line maximally informative, so that people who should be interested will read your post and so that people who wouldn’t be interested can easily avoid it.

    Usefully describe the contents of your post.

    This is OK:

    • “How can I do x with y on z?”
    • “Problem: did x, expected y, got z.”
    • “BUG: doing x with module y crashed z.”

    This is not OK:

    • “Please help!!!”
    • “Newbie question”
    • “Need Ruby guru to tell me what’s wrong”

    These prefixes have become common for subject lines:

    • [ANN] (for announcements)
    • [BUG] (for bug reports)
    • [OT] (for off-topic, if you must post off-topic)

  4. Finally, be considerate: Don’t be too lazy. If you are seeking information, first make a reasonable effort to look it up. As appropriate, check the Ruby home page, check the Ruby FAQ and other documentation, use a search engine to search past postings, and so on.

These guidelines where adopted from the comp.lang.ruby FAQ.