[freeside-users] MAILING LIST POSTING GUIDELINES
ivan
ivan at 420.am
Thu Dec 22 11:41:04 PST 2005
I'm going to try posting this every few months, since people don't seem
to be following the instructions sent when they signed up for the list.
I'd welcome contributions toward making these guidelines more clear and
understandable; towards this end, I've put them in the Wiki at
<http://www.sisd.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Mailing_List_Guidelines>.
--------------------
-----GUIDELINES-----
--------------------
BEFORE YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT POSTING TO THE LIST, READ ALL OF
<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>. YES, THIS MEANS
YOU!
In an effort to keep the noise level down, users are REQUIRED to do the
following before posting questions or problems to the list:
- Report the exact Freeside version being used. If you are using a
snapshot from CVS, report the date you pulled or updated that snapshot
and be aware you are testing and reporting problems in unreleased
development code.
- Report if Apache::ASP or HTML::Mason is being used, and the version
number.
- Verify that the software Freeside depends on (Apache, Perl, DBI, DBD,
the database engine, other Perl modules, etc.) are installed and
working. Problems installing this software are outside the scope of
the list.
- Report the version of the OS, Perl, database engine, DBI and DBD.
- Report the exact error message, if any, and also the relevant contents
of Apache's error.log, if applicable.
YES, THIS MEANS YOU! If you can't report ALL the information requested,
don't bother posting your problem.
--------------------------------
-----EDITORIAL AND EXAMPLES-----
--------------------------------
I am too busy these days to give most mailing list messages about
problems more than a quick skim. If I'm looking at a message and it
strikes me as being something specific to a particular Freeside version,
or OS, or Perl or Pg version or whatever, and that information is
missing, I'm not going to play twenty questions. I'm not even going to
reply and re-send you these guidelines anymore. I'm most likely going
to delete the message and ignore your future posts as well.
BAD:
"I am using version 1.5.8 on a HP Proliant DL145 with 768 MB of RAM.
Apache 1.3.3 and Postgres 7.8."
This poster barely provided any of the information requested,
provided irrelevant information not requested instead, reported
an unreleased version number that could indicate code anywhere from
yesterday to six months old, and reported a non-existant Postgres
version. I am unlikely to give this message a second thought. I'll
probably delete it and go skiing.
GOOD:
"I am using version 1.5.8cvs pulled from CVS on 12/22/2005, on Debian
3.1. I am using HTML::Mason 1.3101, Perl 5.8.7, PostgreSQL 7.4.8, DBI
1.48 and DBD::Pg 1.43."
This poster took the time to read the guidelines and report the
requested information. I am more likely to spend a few minutes of my
time looking at their problem rather than ignoring their message and
going skiing. Unless its a powder day, in which case I'll ignore
everything anyway. :)
--
_ivan
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