The Netiquette Page

Why have a page on netiquette?

This is not a page telling list members to "play nice." (Although it should go without saying - just remember that once what you say is archived, it's there forever. If your grandma would not be proud of you, you probably shouldn't write it. Enough said. This guide is meant instead to be a primer on how to get the best experience from this list. Welcome to the GreenYes mailing list! Can't see the blue "Join" button? Confused? Check out this video on how to join.

Guidelines

Stick to the topics designated for this venue.
If doesn't pertain to recycling, policies and strategies needed to advance sustainable resource issues or something closely related to these environmental concerns, please find another venue to post. If you're not sure, look at some of the previous posts to find out what we talk about.

Text Only.
Please make posts text only. This is important for a number of reasons, the most important of which, it conserves bandwidth. This is a list about conservation in some respects. It only makes sense to carry out bandwidth conservation in this venue. Some folks pay for there email access by the minute, and if they have to download your pretty, graphical 2MB email to greenyes for half an hour it can make for a lot of unhappy members. Consider: Before sending your email, put it in your outbox and check the size. If you aren't yourself writing an epistle, it probably won't be more than 2 to 3 K. If it's bigger, you probably could edit some stuff out.

Keep Graphics to a MINIMUM.
Many G3/G4 plans charge by bandwidth to download heavy images. Ask yourself - "Do I really have to use graphics?" Members who have been around for a while can post graphics with some prudence. Please respect your fellow list members by keeping images to a minimum. If you need to make a graphical point, it would be better to put the graphic on the web and point folks to a URL. That way, members can decide for themselves how much bandwidth they use. If you find a great article on a web journal, copy the link, or copy the text. Do not past in the entire page with all it's graphics. Just paste only the text into your post and send us that. Send us only what's pertinent.

If your post is beginning to look like a newsletter with lots of images and donation links, please find another venue to post.

Do not include graphic borders such as ivy leaves or ribbons or any repeating pattern that may be available in a template from your email application in your posts. They're inappropriate for the list and a waste of bandwidth and storage.

For articles found on the web, do not use web-enabled "email-this-page" to post the article to the list. It takes a lot of time to remove useless ads and images from the archives. Instead, copy the text of the article, along with the title and the author and the url where you found the article and paste these into a post to GreenYes. Remove any ads from the post.

Absolutely No Advertisement.
Zero. Advertisement will not be tolerated from any business concern. There are enough venues where advertising is appropriate. This is ad-free. The only 'advertisement' we allow is that of activist and community environmental events like Earthday and such.

No Proselytizing or Preaching.
Perhaps this is the 'older sister' of advertising. GreenYes list is not a soapbox from which to 'educate' the rest of us about your theories and how you are right and others are wrong. For those who want it, this can be a place of reasoned and respectful debate of the issues without name-calling, name-dropping or innuendo. Be prepared to back up what you say with discursive discussion, real data and reasoned logic - not links from personal or commercial websites.

Social Apps.
There are a number of social apps on phones and tablets that allow people to 'tell-a-friend'. While this is great for facebook, it's not so great for GreenYes. More often than not, the post will include a whole page from the site being quoted, including advertisements. Google puts these posts into the spam-moderation folder, making more work for me and a delayed post for you. Copy and paste only the text that is necessary and add that to a post from your mail app instead - sans ads, sans page headers, sidebars and footers, etc.

Social Networking and Your Address Book...
Many social networks like facebook.com, myspace.com, linked-in.com and reunion.com offer the ability to invite everyone in your entire addressbook to 'join' their network. Do not do this with any list - especially GreenYes. Remove GreenYes from any list of addresses you give to a social network. Social networking is fine, but is not appropriate to post an invitation to a social network on this venue. Plus, consider - are you really sure you want to give a commercial institution your entire address book? Privacy is getting harder and harder to keep. Consider carefully before giving it all away.

Signatures
If you have more than a URL and a few words in your signature and you are a business, your post may be considered to be an advertisement, so please do not abuse the privilege. Do not use a digital image in your signature. It only messes up the digest.

One Small Attachment - and only sparingly.
Send attachments only sparingly. Do not post your weekly newsletter on this list. Use your own venue for that. Post only pdf's or word documents. Long-standing members may use their judgement. Check your attachment size. If it's more than 50K don't post it. Some of our list members use dial-up and will experience great frustration because you wanted to send your entire set of conference photos to the list. Do not include an attachment as a footer or calling card to every single post.

Replies to GreenYes.
If you are making a reply to something on GreenYes, please take care to remove as much of the previous headers and footers as possible, including only the text which is germane to the response you are making. Remember, if you leave the entire body of the message you are responding to and everyone else does too, it makes the archive bigger faster. We pay for webspace, so it helps us if, once again, you conserve.

If you have practical replies that are appropriate to the topic, please post the your reply to the list so that others may benefit from you knowledge or suggestions! Once again, this is good dialog, and people can search the archives for your answers. Also, just a suggestion: if you are sending it to the list, you don't have to copy it to the person who sent it. They'll get it anyway, since they are on the list.

BCC and CC... Blind Carbon Copies and Carbon Copies...
Please post 'TO' the list rather than 'CC'ing the list.
Please never put 'undisclosed recipients' in the 'To' field
when posting to a list. Always put lists in the 'TO' field.

Please do ***not*** blind-carbon copy the list. (BCC)

There are two very important reasons for not BCCing the list:

1. If you post to a public list, it is more courteous to your single 'TO' recipient to let them know you have posted your reply to a list of others as well as the recipient. Full disclosure is best. If you post 'TO' a single person off the list, also include the list in the 'TO' field, rather the 'CC' field. Lists are never 'CC'ed because sheer numbers compels the importance of the group as a recipient. If your reply is something you would relegate to a 'CC' to the list in your own mind, simply reply only to the single recipient and not at all to the entire list.
2. Many modern spam filters such as Spam Assassin tend to frown upon this. Hence, while your message may post, it may not get through to all list members in a timely fashion and may end up buried in a spam folder.

Other considerations: It's very easy to 'reply to all,' but we don't always remember to remove the name of the original poster from the 'TO' field. If you don't, they'll receive two copies. It may not seem important, but in a very lengthy thread with multiple replies from multiple people and multiple cross-posts, it becomes important to verify for all our benefit to whom we are sending the message. Please consider taking the time to be explicit with your address fields.

Replies from the Digest - Subject Headings.
If you receive the digest, please remember that you are probably replying to only one email contained in the entire digest you are replying from. It is especially important for digest members to remove everything unnecessary in the quoted reply and make the subject of the reply the same as that email to which you are replying and not the digest volume and issue numbers. This will conserve webspace in the archive and your email will be categorized by the archiver in the right place rather than as a new subject altogether.

Backlist Member Chatting - It's a good thing
If what you have to say isn't appropriate for the list or is an unrelated question like, "How many people live in Nome, Alaska?", you are encouraged to take it off the list. Good examples are when you are thanking someone for their input, or if you want to know the final outcome of challenging question someone asked the list a while back. If you get a huge number of replies, surely you can thank the entire list as a way to staunch the flow, but otherwise, "backlist" is a good way to go. If you get a great reply and it wasn't posted to GreenYes, please consider posting a reply to your original post (so it archives properly.) - something like: I got these excellent reponses/suggestions..."

Members who exhibit guerilla backlist tactics - targetting various posters with ads, vicious name-calling, slurs or inuendo may be dropped from the list if enough complaints are received. Members are not banned lightly. To bar communication is to stop dialog - which is what lists are all about. If this is just a case of resolving conflict it can usually be done without even informing the list owner of the problem - enough hats already... If multiple members repeatedly receive one-sided lambast with no hint of remorse or reconciliation on the part of the tactician, the owner will probably ban the offending member.

No harvesting emails from this list for use on other lists.
This is a private list. We accept prospective member requests to join GreenYes based on the fact that you are interested in the topics discussed on this list. In order that there is no gray area of understanding: no GreenYes list member may cull, harvest or in any way collect names and email addresses of our members for purposes of mass-mailing through a venue other than GreenYes. Members may not create a new mailing list or enhance another mailling list with our list members at any time for any purpose. For instance, if you have a non-profit mailing list for saving whales, you may not enhance your whale mailing list with our list members. This is not meant to discourage discourse between members via appropriate backlist correspondence as described above, but rather to secure the continued privacy of our members. Our members have in no way opted in to receive emails from your venue. Please don't make me enforce this, because I don't like being ugly.

Crossposting
Please crosspost prudently. Remove any email addresses that are not important. If someone is already in the group and you simply reply-all without deleting their name from the 'to' or 'cc' section, they're going to get two copies. Again - no blind carbon copying, please.