Noisebridge-discuss-faq

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Noisebridge Discuss FAQ

Inspiration over Rules

Communication

The direction of communication is one-to-many. It is up to the poster to consider the many.

Valid reasons for making posts to Noisebridge discuss include

  • Announcing and discussing projects, classes, and events related to Noisebridge.
  • Inciting responses from the many experienced and knowledgeable regular contributors to the community.
  • Proposing project or class ideas.
  • Asking general questions about things related to Noisebridge, including, classes, the wiki, events.

Challenges

We have many different people, from many different backgrounds, with different degrees of familiarity with hacker culture and custom. Misunderstandings under these conditions is common. Sometimes it is deliberately provoked (see "Trolling").

  • Please act as though your respondent is talking in good faith, and not aiming to personally annoy or belittle you. This may not be always true, but it is more true than you might think!
  • If something is misunderstood, seek to clarify, rather than express amazement or disappointment that an idea could be misunderstood.
  • References to the wiki, past conversations, and this document is encouraged, though always understand that nothing at Noisebridge is entirely canonical.

Appropriate Behaviour, Personal Attacks

Posts about appropriate behavior, while inevitable, can become quite unnerving to the large number of list recipients. It's also archived forever on a publicly searchable forum. Noisebridge has a very strong cultural reticence to delete or censor content once posted.

The best place to sort out concerns about personal behaviour at Noisebridge is face-to-face, either with the person you're concerned with, or at our weekly Tuesday meeting. Remember, you can always ask someone to leave and come back to weekly meeting.

It is best not to make posts of an emotional nature, post accusations, personal complaints. That includes complaints disguised as questions. Do not retaliate to such posts on the list (a simple acknowledgement and encouragement to meet at meeting is often best). Do not start a new thread to complain about other threads or people.

Even if your complaint (or defence) is perfectly polite and factual, it is almost inevitable that others' comments will not be.

Trolling and Joke Posts

Noisebridge-discuss has a long historical tradition of strangers writing to the list to provoke an emotional response, and other satirical and whimsical posts. While we treasure our self-trolling, self-gaming tradition, sometimes this can step over the line and disrupt genuine communication.

Under such conditions, the Noisebridge-discuss area turns from a self-regulating anarchy into a terrifying dystopian authoritarian nightmare, controlled by the iron hand of of our Noisebridge-Discuss Moderator. His punishments vary from "switching the mod bit" (which is sort of like a cat o' nine-tails), and throwing people off the mailing list entirely, and/or returning them to the Negative Zone Prison from whence they escaped.

Kneel before Mod!

Posting Style

Posting style in messages intended as responses to other messages can make or break a discussion.

Interleaved Replies

Material quoted from the previous message is attributed to its author and indented with a marker character (usually >). It is trimmed down to just sufficient to provide the context in which the response is made (marking the fact that an edit has been made with one of several common notations, such as: <snip>, [snip], [ ... ], etc.) and the responding text is placed below the quoted material to which it is responding, separated from it by a blank line. (from comp.lang.javascript FAQ)

Bottom Posting

Although less desirable, bottom posting has the advantage over top posting in that chronological order is maintained.

iOS Replies

Bottom posting can be made by selecting the text quote in the reply. See also [Some Quick Interleaved Reply Tips for iOS and Mail.app Users]

Top Posting (don't)

Top posting (replying with your text at the top of the message) can disrupt the conversation; please don't do it.