Re: Please don't laugh...
Graham Smith wrote:
>
> Ok, you can maybe have a bit of a chuckle.
I won't laugh at your expense. But I will suggest that in the future,
you might want to be more courteous to the people from whom you're
asking for help by using an informative subject line for your message.
This mailing list gets hundreds of posts a day. Probably no one reads
all of them -- it'd take too much of the day -- so folks read some and
skip others, typically filtering on the subject line. Without an
informative subject line, other users have to open and start to read
your message before they can even find out whether they know anything
about the subject and thus would be able to help. That's annoying
when one has come home for the day and there's 250 list emails to go
through. In fact, because of this, plenty of gurus who might have helped
you will simply skip your message -- so it's also in *your* interest to
use an informative subject line, as well.
Using an informative subject line makes archives of the mailing list
more useful as well. Months from now, when someone's looking at
thread titles in the archive, how can they know whether "Please don't
laugh..." is going to contain information useful to them?
When you get the time, take a look at this document about asking
technical questions in mailing lists/web fora/etc., which people
have been recommending here for years:
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
It has some good tips, including about subject lines. You may not
choose to follow the recommended format in detail; but comments about
what you're trying to accomplish with your subject line are spot on.
Cheers,
-c
Reply to: