But it would be nice to be able to minimize exposure to them, and I
think this discussion has been useful for many of us.
Personally, I have removed all mailto: links on all my web pages,
and post my FAQ with what I hope looks like "this is an autoresponder
robot's address". I try to direct all people who want to contact me to
a web page which states repeatedly that I do not want them to send me
technical questions, with a link to a "background" page if they don't
understand why. Still, I get my fair share (but only on the order of
one message per month, but then my FAQ doesn't go to any "interesting"
groups).
As long as the "stupid" questions (insert usual disclaimers here)
are relatively far between, I do try to answer them, one way or
another. I usually manage to bring myself to delete my vitriol about
how they obviously don't know anything about netiquette, but only
mostly because I don't like to feel like I'm having an attitude
problem.
I think it would be nice to have a centralized FAQ about these things,
too. Granted, there is already a large number of netiquette documents
out there, but it would seem to me that for the part of the
net.population who are maintaining FAQs, answers to unsolicited stupid
questions are frequently needed. Perhaps there could be a short page
on www.faqs.org we could link to? (It would also feel less imposant to
simply include a link to something somebody else wrote, instead of
some diatribe of my own.)
... Any volunteers to write one up? I'm not sure I'm eloquent
enough.
/* era */
-- Paparazzi of the Net: No matter what you do to protect your privacy, they'll hunt you down and spam you. <http://www.iki.fi/~era/spam/>