Keith Thompson said:
This kind of thing has come up here many times before.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the last month or so. In part due to an
argument in the real (face-to-face) world with someone over what the hell they
mean in an SMS they sent me, and in part because of the frequent admonitions
not to do it in this group.
Another, and perhaps far more important, reason occurred to me a week or so
back and I've been watching several groups I'm involved in to see if it's true,
and it seems to be.
Specifically, an important part of participating in a usenet group is to comply
with it's culture. You stay within whatever it's culture says are the limits
for how far off topic messages can be, you do or don't post binaries to the
appropriate groups, if the group uses almost nothing but short messages, you
don't jump in post long ones, if it says "only post code you've compiled," you
do it that way. All those obvious things. Another factor is that you deal
with the group the way it's culture works. In this (and a few other groups)
it's pretty damn clear that using this sort of posting is considered bad form.
If you've lurked for even a few days before posting, this point HAD to have
become clear. If you didn't lurk first, in itself bad form in any group, then
you get a not particularly nasty chiding from one of the regulars. If you're
grown up about it, you look around, see that you're NOT being singled out, and
say to yourself, "oh, oops" and you move on.
- Bill
