As a curious teenager in the late 90s I once started discovering nmap and subnet masks by scanning everything in my own subnet from my home Telia connection that was in my mothers name.
Shortly after a thick envelope came in the mail and I was very fortunate to catch it before my mother because in it was a stern warning from someone at Telia to stop scanning their equipment and several printed pages of this document on netiquette.
I didn't read it all so I can't be sure it was that exact Rfc, and I'm pretty sure it was in Swedish, but the sheer volume of pages makes me think it was either this rfc translated or something very similar that Telia kept on hand.
Either way, I never shat where I slept again and I read a lot about stealth scanning techniques and proxying after that. ☺
Be brief without being overly terse. When replying to a message,
include enough original material to be understood but no more. It
is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including
all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.
This is made literally impossible by some email clients and some webmail systems. Some interfaces insist on only allow "top-posting" replies, putting your new text at the top, and quoting the previous email in its entirety. It drives me nuts.
I always quote the portion to which I'm replying, and add my reply below that, and recently a reply came back saying - "I like the way you reply, I'm going to reply in the same style!"
For a long, I seemed to be the last person in my area to stick to proper quoting, but I'm afraid I've slipped over the past few years. I think I top-quote more often than not, these days. GMail is partially to blame for that.
I've tried sticking to the proper way for a long time (there was even a plugin for Apple Mail at the time), but eventually gave up on it after getting one too many responses of the "I can't see your email, all I see is my own text quoted" type. This saddens me, but I wasn't about to go on some holy crusade of educating everyone I needed to communicate with about the sin of top-posting.
I think this became recommended practice in the days when usenet and email delivery was unreliable, bandwidth was expensive, and clients didn't have threaded interfaces or fold quoted sections. It's since been slavishly enforced on newcomers by groups that often have no idea of the original reasons for these protocols and why some may be no longer relevant.
Obviously sometimes it's most efficient to quote and interleave, when you want to reply to several points in a way that would be confusing without it. But with modern systems it's also fine to write a reply that doesn't make sense without the message it's in reply to, or a reply that quotes the whole message.
I'd much rather see the reply first - and if I need the context, I can then scroll down to see the quoted message. That way, I don't need to scroll through a lot of context I already know just to see someone's one-line response to it.
Scrolling usually happens from top to bottom. While email clients could simply send the scrollbar to the bottom of the page by default, displaying the message from the bottom, letting the user read the quoted message if they want, it would probably be hard to implement without breaking HTML email.
Scrolling from bottom to top is natural when you want to see something again because you already scrolled to the bottom, but it feels weird when you have to first read the bottom of the page, then scroll up.
If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make
sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the
postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a
response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context
helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!
Thus, bottom posting is correct, full-quote top posting is an abomination. Anyone who argues otherwise is breaking the rules.
This is almost 20 years old technology has changed a lot since then.
Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default.
People don't treat email the same (who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore).
Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top quote.
Threading is a bit better.
Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading.
To the tune of Tomorrow Belongs To Me from Cabaret:
*This Subnet Belongs To Me*
The ‘Net is a creature of patches and parts,
As free as the hawk on the breeze,
With billions of voices and hands and hearts,
Ruled only by RFCs.
O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5,
Your paragraphs murmer to me!
No protocol yet keeps the ‘Net alive
As well as this RFC.
When mailing, recall that the ‘Net’s not secure;
Let copyright laws be your guide;
Ignore any chains; let your quotes stay pure;
Flame not; use a sig; don’t chide.
Check every address; mark your messages “long”;
Use smileys and caps sparingly;
Don’t send an attachment; kneejerks are wrong;
So speaketh this RFC.
O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5,
Your sections are wise as can be!
A luser or guru will surely thrive
By trusting this RFC.
When chatting, be patient and always assume
That talk is as cheap as the dirt;
When posting to news, don’t send spam, or Boom!
Some hax0r will make you hurt!
The guidlines exist both for wisemen and fools,
They’re meant to be read carefully;
For can you imagine what chaos rules
Without such an RFC?
O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5,
Our last and best hope, patently
The ‘Net is a queen-less and smoke-filled hive
Without such a thing
Without such a thing
Without such an RFC!
Twas the night before start-up and all through the net,
not a packet was moving; no bit nor octet.
The engineers rattled their cards in despair,
hoping a bad chip would blow with a flare.
The salesmen were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of data nets danced in their heads.
And I with my datascope tracings and dumps
prepared for some pretty bad bruises and lumps.
When out in the hall there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.
There stood at the threshold with PC in tow,
An ARPANET hacker, all ready to go.
I could see from the creases that covered his brow,
he'd conquer the crisis confronting him now.
More rapid than eagles, he checked each alarm
and scrutinized each for its potential harm.
On LAPB, on OSI, X.25!
TCP, SNA, V.35!
His eyes were afire with the strength of his gaze;
no bug could hide long; not for hours or days.
A wink of his eye and a twitch of his head,
soon gave me to know I had little to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
fixing a net that had gone plumb berserk;
And laying a finger on one suspect line,
he entered a patch and the net came up fine!
The packets flowed neatly and protocols matched;
the hosts interfaced and shift-registers latched.
He tested the system from Gateway to PAD;
not one bit was dropped; no checksum was bad.
At last he was finished and wearily sighed
and turned to explain why the system had died.
I twisted my fingers and counted to ten;
an off-by-one index had done it again...
- Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters
are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges
will be revoked. Notify your local system administrator
if your ever receive one.
I think when I got on the internet around 1996 half of the e-mails I got were chain letters. Proves the fallacy of trying to claim that something is 'forbidden on the internet.'
I worked a college computer lab help desk in 1996. When people reported that they got a chain letter from one of our students, we forwarded it to the folks in charge of the mail servers & they got a stern warning.
Unless you are using an encryption device (hardware or software), you should assume that mail on the Internet is not secure. Never put in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard.
One netiquette question I've wondered about in the past: when emailing an extremely busy person to ask for something, if they send you a message letting you know they've done what you ask, is it better to reply, thanking them (thus giving them yet another email to process) or thank them in advance in your original message?
Thanking in advance is either rude, because you're expecting them to do something, or different, because you're thanking them for taking the time to read the email and consider the request.
If I do something for someone and then never hear from them again, I would be somewhere on the scale from disappointed to annoyed. A one line genuine expression of thanks takes very little time for the recipient. Composing it and getting it right can be difficult and time-consuming, but is, to my mind, always the right thing to do.
Thinking people in advance when you're asking them and not
expecting them to do something always struck me as a bit rude. It
gives off the implicit expectation that they're going to do as you
ask, and you might as well thank them in advance since them agreeing
to do what you're asking is just a formality.
Personally I just express how much they'd be helping me if they did
what I'm asking and how much I'd appreciate it instead.
ESPECIALLY in list, bug report, or other group discussions where you've encountered a bug. If the fix solves it, that's good to know. If not, well, it's less satisfying, but also good to know. And it saves the next person to come along from wondering whether or not what you're discussing has any merits at all.
No need to be verbose about it, but a quick "Hey, that worked, thanks!" (with appropriate top-quoted context) would be just about perfect.
When I do something like this I thank the person for their time in reading my message, but I do not thank them in advance for acting on a request. The former is professional. The latter is presumptuous unless they are obligated to act on your request.
Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages. If you
have really strong feelings about a subject, indicate it via
FLAME ON/OFF enclosures. For example:
FLAME ON: This type of argument is not worth the bandwidth
it takes to send it. It's illogical and poorly
reasoned. The rest of the world agrees with me.
FLAME OFF
This doc is full of gems. Trolls and flame-bait? Just invoke your best Johnny Flame impression.
I really think that if more people took time every day to scour the annals of IETF RFC history, they'd find answers to many of the "new" problems we discover every few years.
As much as I've always been irked by some items in this document (e.g. all-caps, chain letters, etc)... I definitely do not miss the days when half of all discussion in any given forum was meta-babble about how to properly post in the forum. I swear, back in the mid-90's it felt like every single Usenet thread devolved into a shouting match between "bottom posters" and "top posters"! Plonk!
This may be blasphemy, but even at that time I always believed that the tools would have to evolve to fit human nature rather than the other way around. Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it?
Such basic usability features were slow to appear... not because it's all that technically challenging, but rather due to cultural resistance and purity dogma. Nonsense. If any system of human interaction requires a high degree of deliberate and manual cooperation, then it's not tenable and can be improved by technology.
> Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it?
Do they now? As far as I've managed to figure out, gmail has a broken conversation view that only works half the time, and then there's sup -- any other email clients that do a good enough job of threading quoted conversations?
I agree in principle -- fix the software -- but that implies fixing the protocol first -- and we haven't done that yet. XMPP does a little something to help (for conversations) -- but isn't a suitable solution for email-like functionality.
I'd love to be wrong -- but I've yet to use any email client that has decent "smart" threading of conversations (I don't use sup -- as of yet anyway).
Amazing that a lot of this has stood up to the test of time.
A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and
liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages
(we call these "flames") even if you are provoked. On the other
hand, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed and it's
prudent not to respond to flames.
[+] [-] INTPenis|12 years ago|reply
Shortly after a thick envelope came in the mail and I was very fortunate to catch it before my mother because in it was a stern warning from someone at Telia to stop scanning their equipment and several printed pages of this document on netiquette.
I didn't read it all so I can't be sure it was that exact Rfc, and I'm pretty sure it was in Swedish, but the sheer volume of pages makes me think it was either this rfc translated or something very similar that Telia kept on hand.
Either way, I never shat where I slept again and I read a lot about stealth scanning techniques and proxying after that. ☺
[+] [-] ColinWright|12 years ago|reply
I always quote the portion to which I'm replying, and add my reply below that, and recently a reply came back saying - "I like the way you reply, I'm going to reply in the same style!"
Now I can quote an RFC.
[+] [-] mcv|12 years ago|reply
For a long, I seemed to be the last person in my area to stick to proper quoting, but I'm afraid I've slipped over the past few years. I think I top-quote more often than not, these days. GMail is partially to blame for that.
[+] [-] sdfjkl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|12 years ago|reply
Obviously sometimes it's most efficient to quote and interleave, when you want to reply to several points in a way that would be confusing without it. But with modern systems it's also fine to write a reply that doesn't make sense without the message it's in reply to, or a reply that quotes the whole message.
[+] [-] GrinningFool|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dictum|12 years ago|reply
Scrolling usually happens from top to bottom. While email clients could simply send the scrollbar to the bottom of the page by default, displaying the message from the bottom, letting the user read the quoted message if they want, it would probably be hard to implement without breaking HTML email.
Scrolling from bottom to top is natural when you want to see something again because you already scrolled to the bottom, but it feels weird when you have to first read the bottom of the page, then scroll up.
[+] [-] zdw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buugs|12 years ago|reply
Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default.
People don't treat email the same (who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore).
Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top quote.
Threading is a bit better.
Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading.
[+] [-] etfb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] INTPenis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geddes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bencollier49|12 years ago|reply
"You network privileges will be revoked". Well that worked.
[+] [-] csixty4|12 years ago|reply
I miss those days.
[+] [-] pantalaimon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simoncion|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|12 years ago|reply
Still very much true.
[+] [-] moconnor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabemart|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ColinWright|12 years ago|reply
If I do something for someone and then never hear from them again, I would be somewhere on the scale from disappointed to annoyed. A one line genuine expression of thanks takes very little time for the recipient. Composing it and getting it right can be difficult and time-consuming, but is, to my mind, always the right thing to do.
Make it brief, make it genuine.
[+] [-] avar|12 years ago|reply
Personally I just express how much they'd be helping me if they did what I'm asking and how much I'd appreciate it instead.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
ESPECIALLY in list, bug report, or other group discussions where you've encountered a bug. If the fix solves it, that's good to know. If not, well, it's less satisfying, but also good to know. And it saves the next person to come along from wondering whether or not what you're discussing has any merits at all.
No need to be verbose about it, but a quick "Hey, that worked, thanks!" (with appropriate top-quoted context) would be just about perfect.
[+] [-] joshuacc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vog|12 years ago|reply
I thank them in advance, to make clear that they'd be doing me a great favor if they reply. Afterwards, I thank them for having taken that time.
[+] [-] mattlutze|12 years ago|reply
I really think that if more people took time every day to scour the annals of IETF RFC history, they'd find answers to many of the "new" problems we discover every few years.
[+] [-] mattlutze|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StevePerkins|12 years ago|reply
As much as I've always been irked by some items in this document (e.g. all-caps, chain letters, etc)... I definitely do not miss the days when half of all discussion in any given forum was meta-babble about how to properly post in the forum. I swear, back in the mid-90's it felt like every single Usenet thread devolved into a shouting match between "bottom posters" and "top posters"! Plonk!
This may be blasphemy, but even at that time I always believed that the tools would have to evolve to fit human nature rather than the other way around. Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it?
Such basic usability features were slow to appear... not because it's all that technically challenging, but rather due to cultural resistance and purity dogma. Nonsense. If any system of human interaction requires a high degree of deliberate and manual cooperation, then it's not tenable and can be improved by technology.
[+] [-] e12e|12 years ago|reply
Do they now? As far as I've managed to figure out, gmail has a broken conversation view that only works half the time, and then there's sup -- any other email clients that do a good enough job of threading quoted conversations?
I agree in principle -- fix the software -- but that implies fixing the protocol first -- and we haven't done that yet. XMPP does a little something to help (for conversations) -- but isn't a suitable solution for email-like functionality.
I'd love to be wrong -- but I've yet to use any email client that has decent "smart" threading of conversations (I don't use sup -- as of yet anyway).
[+] [-] scelerat|12 years ago|reply
Ahh, the sweet, sweet sound of a Usenet troll landing in your killfile.
[+] [-] tobyjsullivan|12 years ago|reply
If it didn't violate half the rules, I'd email this to everyone I know. Perhaps I'll fax it instead...
[+] [-] teddyh|12 years ago|reply
http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.html
[+] [-] liotier|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GrinningFool|12 years ago|reply
http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3.txt
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gwu78|12 years ago|reply
I remember the first time I used talk. I think it is what got me hooked on UNIX.
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these "flames") even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed and it's prudent not to respond to flames.
[+] [-] frik|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonmales|12 years ago|reply