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We have a public e-mail list for friendly discussion. Please, if you join our discussion list, do read the section on etiquette — it may surprise you!
Our Discussion List
Our venerable discussion list, g-s@duke.edu (“the G-S List”), is for messages having to do with Savoyard member activities in our home region of the North Carolina Triangle area. The number of messages from the list varies from week to week.
Subscribe here. You should receive an acknowledgment and introductory message from the Sympa list server within a few minutes.
If you decide that you don’t want to be on the list any longer, unsubscribe here.
Messages to the community of g-s subscribers should be created just like any e-mail message, and addressed to g-s@duke.edu.
If you need to get in touch with the human administrator of this list, just send a message to g-s-request@duke.edu. The current administrator of g-s@duke.edu is Shiangtai Tuan.
Online etiquette is a recurring topic on most online mailing lists and news groups. While there are no hard and fast rules, we sometimes forget that electronic mail is little different from any other form of human communication. If you wouldn’t stand up and make a remark in front of an assembled group, you probably shouldn’t post that same remark to an electronic mailing list. Moreover, many people use electronic mail for business as well as personal purposes, and that has an effect on individual preferences and expectations.
Here are a few points of online etiquette — guidelines, if you will — that may not be immediately obvious. Most of them have been borrowed shamelessly from a similar document offered by SavoyNet, and edited for the local context.
- Stay on-topic most of the time; identify off-topic posts clearly by beginning the subject line with the text “OFF-TOPIC.” Posts can be humorous, light and entertaining; or, they may be deep, serious and scholarly. But, whatever else they may be, each posting should have a bearing, however tenuous, on the subject of G&S or the activities of the Triangle-area Savoyards or otherwise be of interest to the Savoyards community. Off-topic posts can be particularly bothersome to people who have to manage a large volume of electronic mail on a daily basis. By labeling them with the text “OFF-TOPIC” in the subject, you make it easy to recognize and delete them.
- Keep quoted material to a minimum. This refers to e-mail replies, where the text of the previous message is included in your reply. You can generally assume that subscribers have read earlier posts. Therefore, you need not quote extensively in your reply. Do so only as much as needed to establish the context for what you want to say. At the very least, edit out salutation and signature lines. Often, you can get along without quoting at all.
- Eschew frivolous posts. A frivolous post is one which says little more than “I agree,” “Me too,” or “Wow!” Remember, your post is going to a large number of people. Many of them have significant time, space or financial limitations on the amount of e-mail they can keep up with. While this should not deter you from making a contribution that you consider meaningful, you should avoid posts that make no perceptible contribution to a discussion.
- Remember private e-mail. Not all replies are of general interest. Use private e-mail if your reply is more appropriate to the original poster than to the entire list.
- Conduct quizzes and surveys by private e-mail. A request that is likely to generate numerous short responses, many of which are likely to be redundant, is best handled by private e-mail. The original poster should specifically ask for e-mail replies in her original message. After replies have tapered off, it is then appropriate to post a consolidated summary to the net. A good example would be “Who wants to make a trip to hear So-and-so sing such-and-such?” Post the original question to the list and solicit private replies (not replies to the list), then post a summary or follow-up later.
- Never send a message in anger. You may well regret it, and not only can it not be recalled, it will be read by every single subscriber to the list. And it could very well be saved on the server for many years. If you are angry, and you have a legitimate complaint, wait until you are cool enough to understand others’ feelings or points of view (however wrong they are), then, if you feel it will do some good, compose your message. It’s a good idea to save the message for a few hours or a day before sending it.
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