Is there anything besides personal ads that should be avoided?
Description
This article is from the Singles FAQ, by Trygve Lode tlode@nyx.net with numerous contributions by others.
Is there anything besides personal ads that should be avoided?
Of course there are other things that are best avoided--perhaps
the most important of these are emotional issues for which
other newsgroups have been created. Topics like abortion,
politics, religion, anything by Robert McElwaine, and other
such things are best avoided, not because they aren't valid
issues, but because, like personal ads, it's too easy for them
to take over the newsgroup and drive off those of us who
participate on soc.singles because we like soc.singles.
Remember, anyone who wants to debate abortion can go to
talk.abortion and anyone who wants to post and read personals
can go to alt.personals*--but if soc.singles gets turned into
soc.talk.alt.personals.abortion.religion.politics.McElwaine,
there's no newsgroup where the soc.singlers can go to continue
their discussions.
It's also good form to avoid messages that are pretty much
content-free: don't, for example, quote an entire message that
you agree with and then append "Yeah, what she said" to the
end. Test messages should also be avoided--if you're unsure
whether your messages are getting out or not, post something to
misc.test and you'll get confirmation messages from various
sites around the world to let you know your posting software is
working.
On soc.singles, like any other group, it's best to avoid the
urge to post spelling flames--if you catch a spelling error or
a typo in someone else's post, it does very little good to post
a public message about it, since the other readers will either
have noticed the error themselves--and don't need to be told
about it--or they won't care--in which case they don't need to
be told about it. If it's an informational post that's going to
be reposted later or a signature, you may want to inform the
poster in e-mail, but unless you can turn the spelling error
into an outrageously witty observation (e.g. the original
poster has just made a screamingly funny Freudian slip in
print), there's no reason to post spelling flames publicly.
If you get the urge to add to a pun chain, please don't quote
all the puns so far and then add a pun that already appears
earlier in the message. If you do think of a pun or other witty
rejoinder to add to someone else's article, it's a good idea to
read any followups that have already been posted before posting
your witty response, just to make sure that three or four
people won't have made the same remark already.
Finally, don't ever post chain letters, regardless of whether
they're disguised as plans to create "mailing lists" for big
bucks or not--posting such a message on soc.singles or any
other newsgroup is likely to get your account revoked. It's
been remarked that the "Make Money Fast" chain letters are one
of the few crimminal activities in which the perpetrator signs
his name at the bottom; not only does this make it easy to
report the person posting the article to his or her sysadmin
(and getting the account in question revoked), but the IRS does
consider illegal income taxable and would probably want to
check up on whether the writer claiming to have received
hundreds of thousands of dollars in the mail has paid
everything from income tax to self-employment tax on that
money. (In the unlikely event that the writer actually has
received that kind of money, there may even be a reward to the
person who brings this to the attention of the IRS.)
Continue to:
My Books
