alvitar@xavax.com (Phillip Harbison) (06/01/91)
This article is posted monthly in the hope that it will encourage proper use of comp.arch. Your cooperation will help improve the signal to noise ratio of comp.arch, making the newsgroup more valuable to readers. 1) Consider using mail instead of posting a followup article. If your response is of limited interest to anyone other than the author, then please use mail instead of posting a followup. A mail message goes to a small number of machines, while an article consumes communication and storage resources at thousands of sites. 2) Exhaust local sources of information before posting a question to comp.arch. It makes little sense to waste the communication and storage resources of thousands of sites, not to mention the time of thousands of comp.arch readers, when the answer to your question may be as close as your bookshelf. Do read the manual. 3) If you raise new topics, make sure the subject corresponds to your comments. However, do not needlessly change or amend the subject line, as some news readers allow a user to skip an entire thread based on the subject line. 4) Consider limiting the distribution of your article. Announcements such as user group meetings may be of interest only to a limited geographic area. Check with your local news administrator to see what regional or local distributions are available. 5) Quoting portions of the base article is encouraged. It helps the reader to understand the context of your comments, especially if the reader has not read the base article. However, you should include only as much of the base article as is necessary to convey the context of your comments. Use an editor to remove unnecessary portions of the base article. 6) Make sure your article is related to computer architecture. 7) Computer nostalgia has a place on the net, but that place is not comp.arch. If you are discussing architectural features of past generations of computers, then comp.arch is appropriate. However, the prescribed place for computer nostalgia is alt.folklore.computers. 8) Sale advertisements and product announcements are not appropriate for comp.arch. There are specific groups for these purposes. Try misc.forsale, misc.forsale.computers, and comp.newprod. Also, keep in mind that news articles are distributed by various services which forbid use for personal gain. Sites which use these services often selected newsgroups such as comp.arch assuming a high information content and no personal gain use. Please do not make their life more difficult by posting advertisements and product announcements. -- *realName: Phil Harbison *mailAddress: Xavax, 150 Schildknecht Road, West Hurley NY 12443 *eMailAddress: alvitar@xavax.com *phoneList: <home>: 914-339-4316 <work>: 914-385-2881