In the past, the people using the Internet had grown up with the Internet, were technically minded, and understood the nature of the transport and the protocols. Today, with the mass availability of the Internet, the community of Internet users includes people who are new to the environment. These Newbies are unfamiliar with the culture and don't need to know about transport and protocols. In order to bring these new users into the Internet culture quickly, this Guide offers a minimum set of behaviours which organizations and individuals may take and adapt for their own use. Individuals should be aware that no matter who supplies their Internet access, be it an Internet Service Provider through a private account, or a student account at a University, or an account through a corporation, that those organizations have regulations about ownership of mail and files, about what is proper to post or send, and how to present yourself. Be sure to check with your local authority for specific guidelines.

This section Covers the following areas User Guidelines for the following:

| Email | Chat Rooms | Newsgroups | Flaming | Main Rules | 

Email - Unless you have your own Internet access through an Internet provider, be sure to check with your employer about ownership of electronic mail. Laws about the ownership of electronic mail vary from place to place. Many work places now have clauses in their employee's contract of employment as to their rights to view your email.
- Unless you are using an encryption device (hardware or software), you should assume that mail on the Internet is not secure. Never put in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard.
- Respect the copyright on material that you reproduce. Almost every country has copyright laws.
- If you are forwarding or re-posting a message you've received, do not change the wording. If the message was a personal message to you and you are re-posting to a group, you should ask permission first. You may shorten the message and quote only relevant parts, but be sure you give proper attribution.
- Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked. Notify your local system administrator if your ever receive one. Never pass them on.
- A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (these are called flames) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed and it's prudent not to respond to flames.
- In general, it's a good idea to at least check all your mail subjects before responding to a message. Sometimes a person who asks you for help (or clarification) will send another message which effectively says Never Mind. Also make sure that any message you respond to was directed to you. You might be cc:ed rather than the primary recipient.
- Make things easy for the recipient. Many mailers strip header information which includes your return address. In order to ensure that people know who you are, be sure to include a line or two at the end of your message with contact information. You can create this file ahead of time and add it to the end of your messages. (Some mailers do this automatically.) In Internet parlance, this is known as a .sig or signature file. Your .sig file takes the place of your business card. (And you can have more than one to apply in different circumstances.)
- Be careful when addressing mail. There are addresses, which may go to a group, but the address looks like it is just one person. Know to whom you are sending.
- Watch cc's when replying. Don't continue to include people if the messages have become a 2-way conversation.
- In general, most people who use the Internet don't have time to answer general questions about the Internet and its workings. Don't send unsolicited mail asking for information to people whose names you might have seen in RFCs or on mailing lists.
- Remember that people with whom you communicate are located across the globe. If you send a message to which you want an immediate response, the person receiving it might be at home asleep when it arrives. Give them a chance to wake up, come to work, and login before assuming the mail didn't arrive or that they don't care.
- Verify all addresses before initiating long or personal discourse. It's also a good practice to include the word Long in the subject header so the recipient knows the message will take time to read and respond to. Over 100 lines is considered long.
- Know whom to contact for help. Usually you will have resources close at hand. Check locally for people who can help you with software and system problems. Also, know whom to go to if you receive anything questionable or illegal. Most sites also have Postmaster aliased to a knowledgeable user, so you can send mail to this address to get help with mail.
- Remember that the recipient is a human being whose culture, language, and humour have different points of reference from your own. Remember that date formats, measurements, and idioms may not travel well. Be especially careful with sarcasm.
- Use mixed case. UPPER CASE LOOKS AS IF YOU'RE SHOUTING.
- Use symbols for emphasis. That *is* what I meant. Use underscores for underlining. _War and Peace_ is my favourite book.
- Use smileys to indicate tone of voice, but use them sparingly. :-) is an example of a smiley (Look sideways). Don't assume that the inclusion of a smiley will make the recipient happy with what you say or wipe out an otherwise insulting comment.
- Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages. If you have really strong feelings about a subject, indicate it via FLAME ON/OFF enclosures. For example: FLAME ON: This type of argument is not worth the bandwidth it takes to send it. It's illogical and poorly reasoned. The rest of the world agrees with me. FLAME OFF
- Do not include control characters or non-ASCII attachments in messages unless they are MIME attachments or unless your mailer encodes these. If you send encoded messages make sure the recipient can decode them.
- Be brief without being overly terse. When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including the entire previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material. When removing parts of an email enter <snip> where you have removed parts from.
- Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line with a carriage return.
- Mail should have a subject heading which reflects the content of the message.
- If you include a signature keep it short, and meaningful, your web address, email, or a little ditty if you must. Rule of thumb is no longer than 4 lines. Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay.
- Just as mail may not be private, mail and news are subject to forgery and spoofing of various degrees of detectability. Apply common sense reality checks before assuming a message is valid.
- If you think the importance of a message justifies it, immediately reply briefly to an e-mail message to let the sender know you got it, even if you will send a longer reply later.
- Reasonable expectations for conduct via e-mail depend on your relationship to a person and the context of the communication. Conduct learned in a particular e-mail environment may not apply in general to your e-mail communication with people across the Internet. Be careful with slang or local acronyms.
- The cost of delivering an e-mail message is, on the average, paid about equally by the sender and the recipient (or their organizations). This is unlike other media such as physical mail, telephone, TV, or radio. Sending someone mail may also cost them in other specific ways like network bandwidth, disk space or CPU usage. This is a fundamental economic reason why unsolicited e-mail advertising is unwelcome (and is forbidden in many contexts).
- Know how large a message you are sending. Including large files such as Postscript files or programs may make your message so large that it cannot be delivered or at least consumes excessive resources. A good rule of thumb would be not to send a file larger than 50 Kilobytes. Consider file transfer as an alternative, or cutting the file into smaller chunks and sending each as a separate message.
- Don't send large amounts of unsolicited information to people.
- If your mail system allows you to forward mail, beware the dreaded forwarding loop. Be sure you haven't set up forwarding on several hosts so that a message sent to you gets into an endless loop from one computer to the next to the next.

Chat Rooms

- Chat rooms are a virtual room where two or more people may discuss / chat about a given subject. Some chat rooms are open topic, others are designated a certain topic.
- Keep to the topic designated for the room you are in.
- Spend a bit of time reading others messages before wading in. (think of it as a real life situation you were give two ears and one mouth, so listen first)
- Use mixed case and proper punctuation, as though you were typing a letter or sending mail.
- Don't run off the end of a line and simply let the computers wrap your lines; use a Carriage Return (CR) at the end of the line. Also, don't assume your screen size is the same as everyone else's. A good rule of thumb is to write out no more than 70 characters, and no more than 12 lines (as many chat programs use a split screen).
- Leave some margin; don't write to the edge of the screen. - Always say goodbye, or some other farewell, and wait to see a farewell from others before leaving a room.
- Never divulge personal details to strangers.
- The reasons for not getting a reply are many. Don't assume that everything is working correctly.
- If a person doesn't respond you may try again. If the person still doesn't respond, do not continue to send.
- Chat shows your typing ability. If you type slowly and make mistakes when typing it is often not worth the time of trying to correct, as the other person can usually see what you meant.
- Remember there is no security in a public chat room.
- If you find yourself in a room with inappropriate discussion topics - don't send a message saying that you disapprove - you will probably get flamed, quietly leave the room, and try another.

Newsgroups

- Read all of a discussion in progress (we call this a thread) before posting replies. Avoid posting Me Too messages, where content is limited to agreement with previous posts. Content of a follow-up post should exceed quoted content.
- Send mail when an answer to a question is for one person only. Remember that Newsgroups have global distribution and the whole world probably is NOT interested in a personal response. However, don't hesitate to post when something will be of general interest to the Newsgroup participants. - Consider using Reference sources (Computer Manuals, Newspapers, help files) before posting a question. Asking a Newsgroup where answers are readily available elsewhere generates grumpy RTFM (read the fine manual - although a more vulgar meaning of the word beginning with 'f' is usually implied) messages.
- Although there are Newsgroups that welcome advertising, in general it is considered nothing less than criminal to advertise off-topic products. Sending an advertisement to each and every group will pretty much guarantee your loss of connectivity.
- If you discover an error in your post, cancel it as soon as possible.
- DO NOT attempt to cancel any articles but your own. Contact your administrator if you don't know how to cancel your post, or if some other post, such as a chain letter, needs cancelling.
- If you've posted something and don't see it immediately, don't assume it's failed and re-post it.
- Any time you engage in Newsgroup communications, all the rules above for mail also apply. After all, communicating with many people via one mail message or post is quite analogous to communicating with one person with the exception of possibly offending a great many more people than in one-to-one communication. Therefore, it's quite important to know as much as you can about the audience of your message.
- Read the contents of newsgroups carefully before you post anything. This helps you to get an understanding of the culture of the group, and the way that responses are made.
- Do not blame the system administrator for the behaviour of the system users.
- Consider that a large audience will see your posts. That may include your present or your next boss. Take care in what you write. Remember too, that Newsgroups are frequently archived, and that your words may be stored for a very long time in a place to which many people have access.
- Assume that individuals speak for themselves, and what they say does not represent their organization (unless stated explicitly).
- Remember that both mail and news take system resources. Pay attention to any specific rules covering their uses your organization may have.
- Messages and articles should be brief and to the point. Don't wander off-topic, don't ramble and don't send mail or post messages solely to point out other people's errors in typing or spelling. These, more than any other behaviour, mark you as an immature beginner. People using the internet come from all walks of life, and it is bad netiquette to correct somebody online, which could be beyond their control, they may not be as well educated as yourself, or may not speak English as their first language. Be considerate.
- Subject lines should follow the conventions of the group.
- Forgeries and spoofing are not approved behaviour.
- Advertising is welcomed on some lists and Newsgroups, and abhorred on others! This is another example of knowing your audience before you post. Unsolicited advertising that is completely off-topic will most certainly guarantee that you get a lot of hate mail.
- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response. Giving context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!
- Again, be sure to have a signature which you attach to your message. This will guarantee that any peculiarities of mailers or newsreaders which strip header information will not delete the only reference in the message of how people may reach you.
- If you find a personal message has gone to a list or group, send a short apology to the person or to the group.
- If you should find yourself in a disagreement with one person, make your responses to each other via mail rather than continue to send messages to the list or the group. If you are debating a point on which the group might have some interest, you may summarize for them later.
- Don't get involved in flame wars. Neither post nor respond to incendiary material.
- Avoid sending messages or posting articles that are no more than gratuitous replies to replies.
- There are Newsgroups that discuss topics of wide varieties of interests. These represent a diversity of lifestyles, religions, and cultures. Posting articles or sending messages to a group whose point of view is offensive to you simply to tell them they are offensive is not acceptable. Sexually and racially harassing messages may also have legal implications. There is software available to filter items you might find objectionable.

Flaming

Flaming is what people do when they express a strongly held opinion without holding back any emotion. It's the kind of message that makes people respond, "Oh come on, tell us how you really feel." Tact is not its objective.
Does Netiquette forbid flaming? Not at all. Flaming is a long-standing network tradition (and Netiquette never messes with tradition). Flames can be lots of fun, both to write and to read. And the recipients of flames sometimes deserve the heat.But Netiquette does forbid the perpetuation of flame wars -- series of angry letters, most of them from two or three people directed toward each other, that can dominate the tone and destroy the camaraderie of a discussion group. It's unfair to the other members of the group. And while flame wars can initially be amusing, they get boring very quickly to people who aren't involved in them. They're an unfair monopolization of bandwidth.

Main Rules

1. Do not flame. To flame is to say obnoxious or insulting things to or about someone.
2. Do not criticize people's news posts based on their spelling or grammar
3. Post in the appropriate group and do not Spam. In general terms, spamming is posting an article to newsgroups where it does not belong. More specifically, spamming involves posting an article, generally of a commercial nature, to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of newsgroups.
4. Be ethical
5. Breaking the law is bad Netiquette
6. What's perfectly acceptable in one area may be dreadfully rude in another. For example, in most TV discussion groups, passing on idle gossip is perfectly permissible. But throwing around unsubstantiated rumours in a journalists' mailing list will make you very unpopular there.
7. When you enter a domain of cyberspace that's new to you, take a look around. Spend a while listening to the chat or reading the archives. Get a sense of how the people who are already there act. Then go ahead and participate.
8. Respect other people's time and bandwidth
9. You are not the centre of cyberspace
10. Know what you're talking about and make sense
11. Pay attention to the content of your writing. Be sure you know what you're talking about -- when you see yourself writing it's my understanding that or I believe it's the case, ask yourself whether you really want to post this note before checking your facts. Bad information propagates like wildfire on the net.
12. Share expert knowledge
13. Everyone was a network newbie once. And not everyone has had the benefit of reading from this site. So when someone makes a mistake -- whether it's a spelling error or a spelling flame, a stupid question or an unnecessarily long answer -- be kind about it. If it's a minor error, you may not need to say anything. Even if you feel strongly about it, think twice before reacting. Having good manners yourself doesn't give you license to correct everyone else. If you do decide to inform someone of a mistake, point it out politely, and preferably by private email rather than in public. Give people the benefit of the doubt; assume they just don't know any better. And never be arrogant or self-righteous about it. Just as it's a law of nature that spelling flames always contain spelling errors, notes pointing out Netiquette violations are often examples of poor Netiquette.

And finally a note on swearing - Is it acceptable?

Only in those areas where sewage is considered an art form, e.g., the USENET newsgroup alt.tasteless. Usually, if you feel that cursing in some form is required, it's preferable to use amusing euphemisms like effing and sugar. You may also use the classic asterisk filler -- for example, s***. The reasons are obvious and it is somehow appropriate to the net, you avoid offending anyone needlessly. And everyone will know exactly what you mean.

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