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comp.software.testing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Section - 4. Netiquette

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See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge
Did I mention that you should read the FAQs in news.announce.newusers if
you haven't done so lately?  Also, you can reduce the chances of
embarrassing yourself by reading comp.software.testing for a while
before posting.  At the very least, scan all the articles in the group
currently on your server to make sure your question hasn't already been
asked and answered.

Please help the newsgroup's participants find articles in the categories
they're interested in.  If your posting falls into the categories below,
please put the three-letter tag at the beginning of your subject line.
This will also increase the likelihood that those wanting to read your
post will find it.  For example, your subject line might read -
"Subject: ADV: Widget Tester 6.0 released".

    JOB: Help wanted ads
    ANN: Announcements for new books, publications
    CFP: Call for papers or participants
    CNF: Conference announcements
    ADV: Other advertisements and commercial product announcements
     CV: Curriculum Vitae, looking for a job 

Job postings that are cross-posted to the various job-related
newsgroups should not be posted to comp.software.testing, since the
subject conventions for those groups do not allow them to be easily
identified as job postings, and the misc.jobs FAQ
(<ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/jobs/welcome-faq>)
specifies that job postings should not be cross-posted between the
job-related newsgroups and non job-related newsgroups.

Some recruiters refuse to follow the job posting policy.  If you don't
want to read job postings, consider using a kill file to
systematically kill articles from these recruiters.

Many questions about a particular test tool only interest those readers
who use that tool.  Please make sure to put the name of the test tool
in the subject line so readers can select the articles they read by
looking at the subject.  In general, please use a descriptive subject
line.

If you post an article and later decide you shouldn't have posted it,
please cancel it.  It is much better to correct the problem than to
send *another* post to apologize for the first one.  Situations where
this would be appropriate include posting empty articles, multiple
copies of the same article, and any goof where you'd like to correct
something you posted shortly after it was sent.  Look in your
newsreader documentation for help with cancelling an article; some also
have a "supercede" feature which makes it easy to correct a posting.

While the cancel feature has been common for quite some time, some
newer newsreaders unfortunately do not offer it.  If this is the case,
complain to the author, and consider using a more reasonable
newsreader.  Here's a manual method to cancel an article - start to
follow up to the errant posting.  Change the subject to
"cmsg cancel <message-id>", where message-id is taken from the
References: header or the attribution.  The body of the message is not
important.  Post it, and the news system should interpret it as a
cancel request rather than a real posting.  You can only do this for
an article you posted yourself.

People have also expressed concern about postings that are totally
off-topic.  These postings are typically "spam" postings that go to most
of the thousands of newsgroups that exist.  There is very little that an
unmoderated group can do proactively to prevent them.  See
news.admin.net-abuse.usenet and
<http://www.tezcat.com/~gbyshenk/ive.been.spammed.html> for more
information.

Please don't post test messages to comp.software.testing.  This group
is for discussing software testing, not for testing your news
software.  If you want several automatic confirmations that your post
worked, post a test message to misc.test.  There are other test groups
at various levels of the news hierarchy that all end in ".test".  It's
best to try a local one first.

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Top Document: comp.software.testing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Previous Document: 3. What is this newsgroup about?
Next Document: 5. Beta testing

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Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer:
raymond.rivest@crim.ca (Raymond Rivest)





Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:12 PM