People have been responding to this as if it had to do with
guidelines for formatting and posting FAQ lists, but I
interpreted it as having do do with the format of *all* articles
posted by all posters; in other words, a new addition to the
news.announce.newusers suite of FAQ lists, alongside "Hints on
writing style for Usenet" and the like.
I agree that such a posting would be a good idea. Usenet is
being visited upon by more and more users of more and more
commercial systems, all with their own proprietary interfaces,
and too many of the designers of these interfaces appear to have
taken the "I'm too busy to see how the others look, I'll just
invent something that's how I think it should work" design
approach. (Others have retrofitted Usenet support into existing,
wildly different, conferencing and messaging systems.)
The operators of these systems and the authors of these
interfaces are, sad to say, for the most part *not* going to
teach their users how to format postings according to any Usenet
customs or traditions, so if we'd like to keep things from
becoming (in our eyes) less and less readable, it's up to us
to do something about it. (Of course, too many new users don't
read news.announce.newusers, but at least there'd be something
to point at.)
An article formatting guide wouldn't have to be that long.
Here's a topic list, off the top of my head:
"Hints in formatting articles for a Usenet audience"
Keep lines under 70 characters; use your RETURN key if
necessary.
Separate paragraphs by blank lines (\n\n).
Quote some context; use cut-and-paste if your posting
software won't do it for you.
Make sure it's very obvious what's quoted text and what's
your text; if you can't pick a method, just use an
initial "> ". (Don't try to use indents alone, and
especially don't indent your comments and leave the
replied-to text unindented). Make sure you cite who
you're quoting. Quoted context should come first,
followed by what you have to say; don't tack the context
on at the end. (Also, remember to trim context.)
Stick to 7-bit ASCII; don't use fancy graphics or
line-drawing characters (this includes .sig's);
if you must use non-ASCII characters, use MIME or some
other Internet standard for representing/encoding them,
and be prepared for not all readers to be able to see
them.
If you compose articles off-line, remember to upload them
in "text" mode before posting, or otherwise ensure that
they're not posted with trailing ^M's on each line.
Make sure that your header fields (Subject:, etc.) are
really in the header; beware of posting methods
(especially ones involving off-line composition) which
result in dummy headers like "Subject: article for posting"
with the real headers hidden in the body.
I'm sure anyone (and Jack in particular, given his lament) could
quickly add several more topics to this list. (Ron Newman's
proposed "`Good Net-Keeping Seal' for Usenet software" might also
be a good source of ideas.)
I agree that there are too many editing and composition systems
out there to describe in detail, but some general guidelines are
certainly possible (and vital), e.g. "what to do if your editor
doesn't break lines automatically", "how to quote context if your
followup command doesn't do it automatically", "how to quote long
lines that the poster forgot to break", etc.
The faq-maintainers list probably isn't the right place to
coordinate the writing of such a document, though; someone might
want to post a few feelers to news.newusers.questions or
news.software.readers or something.
Steve Summit
scs@eskimo.com
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