WELCOME TO REC.ARTS.COMICS (part 4 of 10: Netiquette)
written by lots of different people
edited by Paul A. Estin 1990-1993
Tom Galloway 1993-present
[last update: 6/13/95]
4. Netiquette (Guidelines for posting articles)
Lesson 1. This is Usenet. It is not AOL. It is not Compuserve. It is not Prodigy. It is not Fidonet. It is not a BBS. You are posting to/reading a newsgroup, not a bboard, not a board, not a base, etc. It is your responsibility to learn the customs of the Usenet environment *before* posting. Practices which may be accepted on BBSes, AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, local systems, etc. may not be accepted on Usenet. And there's usually a good reason why they're not.
To begin, go read the articles in the newsgroup news.announce.newusers, especially "A Primer on How to Work with the USENET Community". These are essential, general, documents on how to interact with the rest of the Usenet community. When you post, it will be assumed by others that you've read these, and if you violate their netiquette lessons, you'll likely not get as much out of Usenet as you otherwise would. To be blunt, if you can't be bothered to learn the customs here, people will be less willing to read your posts or interact with you.
If for some reason you can't find the articles in news.announce.newusers, you can FTP them (see part 5 for more information about FTP). The critical ones to read are:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.announce.newusers/Rules_for_posting_to_Usenet
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.announce.newusers/Hints_on_writing_style_for_Usenet
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.announce.newusers/What_is_Usenet?
After you've done that, read these r.a.c.-specific comments:
The most common r.a.c. netiquette mistakes made by newbies are:
In more detail:
Make sure you post to the proper newsgroup, as explained in Part 1, on the r.a.c hierarchy and related newsgroups. In general, there is very little crossposting between the different r.a.c. newsgroups. In particular, do *not* crosspost between r.a.c.marketplace and any other r.a.c. group. Do *not* post for sale or looking for ads on any r.a.c. group other than r.a.c.marketplace. If the post is only about X-Men related titles, do not post it anywhere other than r.a.c.xbooks.
Post because you want to say something about comics, or ask a question about comics. Don't post to satisfy your ego. Respect other posters' opinions, even if you disagree with them. When arguing a point, rational argument with examples is preferable to sheer volume, or, worse, to personal attack. Say something substantive, that others would like to read and perhaps reply to.
A special case of the above: If people aren't posting about a comic or character you're interested in, your best bet to start conversation about it is to post something relatively substantial about the topic. If you just post "I like Suicide Squid. Does anyone else?" it's doubtful you'll get much response. Posting "I like Suicide Squid because (reasons)" or "Does anyone know why this happened in Suicide Squid #37?" or even "Top Ten Reasons Suicide Squid Should Be Chopped Up Into Calimari (reasons)" will be much more likely to get discussion going. If you just post a complaint that Suicide Squid isn't being posted about, you'll get back that if you want Squiddy discussed, you should start a discussion. Don't expect others to work at entertaining your particular preferences if you're not willing to also work at it.
This is a generally a friendly, tolerant hierarchy, and we like to keep it that way. One of the things which can destroy the pleasant atmosphere around here are "flames": inflammatory, insulting posts. People send articles saying things that they would never say to one another in person, perhaps because of the anonymity that electronic newsgroups provide. Please refrain from doing this. There are people on the other end of your message, and they're likely to take offense at your taking offense. The result is called a "flame war", and it wastes the time of everybody on the newsgroup. When you respond to an article, even one with which you vehemently disagree, try to respond to the article, not the poster; give reasoned rebuttal, not personal invective. Also, try not to dash off a reply in anger; you may regret it later. Instead, wait until after you've had some sleep and calmed down, before you reply. Finally, note that the best way to avoid a flame war with someone who is obviously looking for "attention" is to ignore that person.
All too often there are outbreaks of "taste wars" where rather than critiquing books, people critique the people who read a certain book or line. Consider this a special case of the above two categories. Have something to say, support your arguments, and argue against another post's substance or lack thereof, not to your assumed perception of its author. It is perfectly acceptable to post something like "People who read nothing but Suicide Squid comics should try to look at some other comics; if you enjoyed Black Ink Irregulars you might like Mid-Atlantic Secret Squadron from Calamari. Here's why..." or "I'm tired of people bashing those of us who read Suicide Squid; I happen to *like* reading Black Ink Irregulars and Li'l Squiddie. Here's why..." Either of these sorts of posts is a lot more likely to convince people of the Rightness of Your Opinions than is loud spleen-venting.
Furthermore, as a general rule, either liking or disliking an entire company's output is a position of questionable merit. Many have gotten to the point where they tend to follow favorite writers and artists, instead of characters or companies. While there can be noticible trends in companies' output, if a company does more than a handful of titles there's a good chance there's some title(s) you'll think are "better" or "worse" than what you might expect from that company on average.
At the same time, though, people can get awfully pretentious. The best thing to do, again, no matter which side you're on, is to back up your posts with substance, and to reply to specifics, because much of the arguing is due to misunderstanding another's position.
Subtle humor tends to be missed in text-only form. There is a standard net method for indicating sarcasm: the "smiley", a group of symbols which look like a smiley-face on its side, like this :-)
(A post with a non-generic reference to Suicide Squid is also fairly likely to be less than serious...)
Many types of replies are best given by private electronic mail, not posted to the entire newsgroup audience. This seems obvious, but many people ignore this. For example, if someone posts a poll or a trivia contest, you should reply to them by electronic mail. Don't post!
The rule of thumb here is to think about whether anyone outside of yourself and the person you're responding to would have any interest in your post. There is no reason to subject tens of thousands of other readers to content free to them posts consisting entirely of "I agree", "Me too!", "Thank you", "I liked your post", "I'm a big fan of your work", etc. If only the person you're responding to would be interested, email, don't post.
As a special case of the above, posts which ask for people to post their top N titles/storylines/characters/etc. are discouraged. Unless these lists have reasonably detailed explanations of why the poster has these particular entries, seeing a list of N just names/titles gets old fast. Posting that you're running an email poll on the top N whatevers and will post results is much better. But even then, it's likely that a lot of frequent posters/old-timers won't reply since they'd been there, done that, many times before.
Many posting programs make it easy to include text from the article you're responding to. Take care to edit this text down to the minimum needed to understand your new contribution to the discussion. Many r.a.c. readers skip past articles with a lot of included text, particularly at the beginning of an article. A rule of thumb is that if you include more than 10 lines of quoted text in a row, you're almost certainly doing something wrong. More than 5 and you probably are. Including more than 20 quoted lines at the start of your post will insure that a fair number of people will *not* read it, as all they'll see at first is a screen of quoted material. Habitually including too many quoted lines gets you put in kill files. To be blunt, people have found it a good rule of thumb that if someone can't be troubled to edit down quoted text to make their post easier to read, what they post usually isn't worth taking the extra time/effort to read.
In particular, unless you are actually commenting on it in your post, there is no reason why you should ever include the .sig from an article you're responding to. The person's id is given at the start of the included text, and that's sufficient.
You can include a signature on the end of your posts. (In "rn", if you create a ".signature" file, it will be added automatically.) But keep it short. Nothing is more boring than wading through the same long signature repeated on multiple articles. A maximum of four lines is suggested (and, on some systems, four is the maximum possible). You may see some frequent posters use longer .sigs. In general, these are people who include particularly interesting quotes (or original writing) in their .sigs and change it on a weekly or even per message frequency. Ascii art and lettering, borders, etc. is old hat to most people, and multiple quotes in a single .sig are definitely frowned on.
This is especially important for answering questions that lots of people know the answers to, such as "What's the name of that bald guy who founded the X-Men?" or "When did Elrod last appear in Cerebus?" If you want to respond to an article or query, mark it (use the "M" key in "rn"), make sure no one has already said what you want to, and *then* go back and reply. Or, just be safe and answer by e-mail instead of posting.
Don't assume that, simply because there weren't any follow-ups to your post, that it didn't go out. *Most* messages do not generate any follow-ups. If you go and post the message again, simply because it didn't cause discussion or get an answer to a question the first time, you will simply annoy others and make yourself look foolish. If you're really concerned about whether your posts are making it out, you might email a poster at a site other than yours and ask if they'd check if they've received your posts.
"Cross-posting" is the practice of posting the same article to multiple newsgroups. If you're posting a review about the Akira movie, for example, then it would be relevant to the newsgroups rec.arts.anime and rec.arts.movies.reviews. Depending what you have to say (perhaps you are comparing the film to the manga version), it might also be relevant to rec.arts.comics.misc or rec.arts.manga. But try to limit crossposts as much as possible, and when you feel you must cross-post, include a "Follow-up:" line to only one of the newsgroups (in the sample case, probably "Follow-up: rec.arts.anime").
"Distribution" refers to how far a post will propagate. While the majority of r.a.c. readers and posters seem to be from the United States, there have been posts from Canada, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia/New Zealand, obviously meaning there are readers there as well. For general comics matters, the correct distribution will be "world" so as not to leave anyone out who isn't from your state/province, country, or continent. On the flip side, if you're posting about a local event, post to "local" distribution or whatever is appropriate (e.g., "nj" for New Jersey). Sometimes it's hard to tell what's appropriate; thus, if you're telling people about a convention in the Boston area, and some people from outside Massachusetts might be interested (likely true), then you may wish to post to a wider area, like "usa" or "na". But try to apologize in advance when you do. Also, distributions don't always work, so if you in Australia see a post for a small 1-day convention in Boston, don't flame or otherwise admonish the poster without first checking that the distribution line isn't in fact "ne" and the post has escaped its attempted limitation.
In r.a.c, this means that it's preferable to include your source when stating "news" or "rumors". For example, you might write, "I read in CBG that Alonzo Mori won't be writing Suicide Squid after issue #100." That's preferable to stating "I heard that..."
Please note that claiming unnamed "inside sources" is an almost sure way of casting doubt on your credibility. People are only able to get away with this to any degree once they've built up a reputation of being reliable, have shown they do indeed know people in the industry, and when it's clear there's a good reason for the anonymity. Keep in mind that there are several people here who really do either know people in the industry or are actually professionals and have established a reputation for reliability. All doing this sort of thing will do is hurt your net.reputation for a long time, because you will get called on it.
Ever had someone tell you events in a movie that you wanted to see, spoiling the surprise? It's the same with comics. If something you say might "give away" information about a new comic, state "WARNING: SPOILERS" at the beginning and/or header of your article. Also, insert a "<ctrl>L" so that the article doesn't scroll. In the "emacs" editor, this is done by typing <ctrl>Q followed by <ctrl>L. In the "vi" editor, type <ctrl>V and then <ctrl>L. Note that the <ctrl>L must be the first character on a line for this to work. If you include quoted text which includes a <ctrl>L, you'll have to remove the quote indicator character(s) or space in front of it for it to work.
With very few exceptions, the creators and/or owners of the original artwork will not have approved their work being scanned in and electronically distributed for free. Without such approval, doing such is a copyright and/or trademark violation and is strongly discouraged. To get more information about copyrights and trademarks (hints: Yes, it's copyrighted even if it doesn't have an explicit copyright notice, it doesn't matter if you're not making money off it, and if you think it's such great free advertising, you're welcome to get the owner to agree to your posting it or making it available instead of assuming), see either the misc.legal copyright FAQ or Brad Templeton's Ten Common Myths About Copyright post in news.announce.newusers. These can also be found at:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/Copyright-FAQ. ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/Copyright-FAQ/myths/part1
There are several people who post reviews of comics (usually on r.a.c.info) periodically. Feel free to post your own reviews. Jim Drew has helpfully provided the following suggested guidelines:
Jim's Rules of Review (like Robert's Rules of Order, and followed as often
B-)
[end of Part 4] This Welcome Message/FAQ is Copyright 1991-5 by Tom Galloway, and is made available as a service to the Internet community. It may not be sold in any medium, including electronic, CD-ROM, or database, packaged with any commercial product, or published in print, without the explicit, written, permission of Tom Galloway.
"There are no net.gods, just some people with bigger mouths than others."