So the internet has been around for quite a little while now, but I am still constantly plagued by people who can’t follow netiquette. I belong to more than a couple of newsgroups, and people seem to consistently forget or ignore these particular rules:
Follow the damn instructions! I’m on a few art job lists, and just the other day a job offer came in to everyone on the list. The post described the job and then finished with “please contact me, if you are interested and can provide a sample in this style.” So a guy posts this in the next message – to the entire list of 26 people:
HI J
Im interested in this job
can i participate?
have i another chance????
Lesson number one in how to embarrass yourself in e-public. It’s a thing of beauty that J replied back to the list exactly this, and nothing more:
“please contact me, if you are interested and can provide a sample in this style.”
ALL CAPS IS ANNOYING! I’m on a list for gigs in BC, and one promoter posts there regularly. Her posts, many of which are quite long, are entirely in allcaps. And then she adds at the bottom “I USE CAPITALS..IM NOT YELLING..I LIKE IT”
Well you may like it, but you’re probably the only one and you’re on a public forum where I assume you are not actively trying to dissuade people from reading your promos. To me, that’s what the effect is.
When replying to a post/email – don’t quote unnecessary text. I get some of my group messages in digest format, and it’s incredibly annoying to have to scroll through literally pages of old quoted junk to get to the new stuff. Check out this one message below. Note that the actual meat of the post is 6 lines out of about 55, and that this one post is out of about a dozen I got in the digest.
[edited out]
I think you’re probably the only person I know who uses systems like Yahoogroups *AND* sets themselves for DailyDigest. I’m not entirely sure what they consider the type of message flow that would make DD make sense, but I’m sure the VF isn’t it… Maybe something that’s single-postings with no replying (like a job posting list or something). As for the person who types in all caps, I think you should encourage people to phone her voicemail and yell into it for the entire message. Like, really hollerin’… I think that’d be fun. Of course, I think a lot of folks with Cel phones are already doing this – at least, that’s what it looks like. The accidental rebroadcast is always fun, too. I love seeing someone’s assumed private reply get “group-banded” like that. Makes me giggle.
Of course, today, someone at work told me that I should use smilies if I’m being funny. I told them that smilies were a way to tell people you were TRYING to be funny. If I’m funny, 90-degree-rotated punctuation won’t be necessary. If I’m not funny, 90-degree-rotated punctuation won’t help.
I used to hate smilies, but I do use them sometimes just to let the other person know that I’m being a smartass not because I’m trying to offend them, but because it’s funny. As for the VF group – if I get individual emails, I get way too much stuff in my inbox (I don’t have time to sift through all the messages – sometimes I just delete the daily digest and remind myself it’s all checkable on the yahoogroups website. But the problem with checking them on the website is the ads. They’re really annoying. I enjoy the news and chatter on the VF list and I still think daily digest is the best way for me. If people would take an extra few seconds to edit out the chaff from their posts, it would make it even MORE enjoyable! Plus it’s a good habit to get into all around.