It's a whole different culture out there, Captain. But it's logical, once you get used to it. Mike Holderness explains a few simple rules to avoid becoming the laughing-stock of the net...

Flame-bait and getting off the hook

I have lurked not wisely, but too well :->

You read the hype. You got connected to the Internet. You are excited about being plugged into probably the greatest information resource ever created. Twenty or thirty million people are out there just waiting to communicate with you! You want to know everything there is to know about... baroque music. You pick twenty Usenet news-groups out of the 3000 available to you, and send a message to each: "Tell me where I can get information about baroque music".

Next time you connect, your mail-box is full of messages from the four corners of the earth. Joy! Communication! But what's this? Message after message is abusive. But why? You only asked. And you're being admonished about things you're not even sure you can pronounce. "Spamming"? "FAQ"? "RTFM"?

Welcome to Usenet. You have been flamed.

Usenet may suddenly seem very unfriendly indeed. Some of those millions out there are in bad moods. But you have just broken three of the cardinal rules of netiquette -- the etiquette of the net.

First, you put questions in public discussion fora -- the "news- groups" -- without reading what's already there to find out what's relevant.

Second, you sent the same message to too many groups. This duplication is known as "spamming" -- a term currently believed to derive from an American misunderstanding of Monty Python, but which may have a different history next month. Some people out there just paid good money to fetch 20 copies of your inane message.

Inane? Yes. People have been sharing information in Usenet news- groups for a while now. Most questions have -- believe it -- been asked before. Some have entered the canon of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Most news-groups with any serious content maintain a list of these questions, and answers to them, often refined through years of argument. Before asking on-line, it's a rather good idea to RTFM: that's "RT" for "Read The" and "M" for "Manual".

So, the most important part of netiquette is when and what not to write. Before you post to a news-group, "lurk" for at least a couple of weeks. That is: read, shut up, and absorb the flavour of the communication. If you know the answer to someone's question, resist temptation until you have read to the end of the "thread" of responses. (The author committed this sin last week in uk.misc. Sorry. I should at least have sent the answer as private mail.)

Think of joining a news-group as the equivalent of walking into a characterful bar in a strange town and striking up a conversation. The physical risks are smaller. The social risks are almost identical, except that no-one can see you blush and, if you need to hide, the lock on the toilet door works.

Few bars in The Real World, though, have conversation manuals -- FAQ lists. Try to locate these (instructions below). Down-load them onto your computer. Read them, or at least scan for key- words.

Some time later... you're nearly ready to start contributing to the global deluge of information, opinion and utter drivel that is Usenet.

Others display a total lack of netiquette: but you're above all that now. The same bores turn up all over the "place". You don't want people putting you alongside them in their "kill file", do you? (This is the electronic equivalent of the Soviet photo- retoucher taking Trotsky out, rather than the guy with the ice- pick. A kill-file entry causes a specified un-person's articles to vanish from view.)

If you've lurked well, you'll have discovered some strange conventions. Most responses to news-group articles quote the original. The quotes are indented with (usually) ">" in the left margin. The reason for this is the technology of the Internet, Bitnet and the other nets that Usenet lives on, in which packets of information effectively find their own way to their destination. So it's not at all unusual for the answer to arrive before the question. It needs to make sense by itself.

Remember too that most of the founders of this thing dream in the C computer language, and if asked the way to the Post Office will quite naturally give you a pointer to a pointer to the answer. They positively enjoy the rabbinical complexity of commentaries to commentaries to commentaries, all obsessively attributed and nested up to eight layers deep, not counting contrived cases.

But just because your news-reader program offers the option of quoting the entire message you're responding to, don't: that's the sin of "wasting bandwidth". (What's bandwidth? Well, you could read Claude Shannon on information theory; or you could accept it as "net capacity of any kind".) Quote the necessary minimum, but leave the attributions alone.

If you have invested the new-car money in a wardrobe-sized monitor for your computer, don't show off. Keep your messages around 60 characters wide so the rest of us can read and quote them.

Though the net population is expanding rapidly across geographical and some social divides, the defining culture is still that of US computer science departments. The cultural differences may not be what you think they are.

It is not in fact true, for example, that all US citizens are irony-impaired. Lenny Bruce and Angela Davis are as American as Gerald Ford. The trouble is that written communication in news-groups lacks any "tone of voice", and is read by Gerald Fords as well as Brooklyn cosmopolitans -- and Slovak cosmologists for whom English is a fourth language.

Be aware that only three people outside the UK are familiar with jokes from Mr Bean, and they're obsessive Anglophiles from Iowa who'll haunt you for the rest of your life :-) If you must use irony, flag it very obviously with a "smiley" symbol, as above.

Oddly, the best guide to netiquette available online is Emily Postnews, named ironically after one of those po-faced US guides to three-dimensional etiquette. For example, on signing your messages: "Try to include a large graphic made of ASCII characters, plus lots of cute quotes and slogans. People will never tire of reading these pearls of wisdom again and again, and you will soon become personally associated with the joy each reader feels at seeing yet another delightful repeat of your signature."

When you first got access to Usenet, you should have been "subscribed" to a news-group called news.announce.newusers. If you weren't, shout at your system administrator. Read the messages -- all 250k or more. If you neglected, or were unable, to do this earlier, fetch the articles now (instructions below).

There is even now a printed book called Netiquette, by Virginia Shea. This seems to be missing the point somehow. After all, ploughing through news.announce.newusers is good practice for the sort of on-screen speed-reading skill you'll need to keep up with even a tiny portion of your interests on the net.

If you get it all wrong, you are liable to get "flamed": to receive abusive messages from the above-mentioned computer science departments. This, perhaps more than the primary netiquette sins, is the most annoying thing about the net: the boys who've been using it for three months and feel the need to correct the newbies.

If the netizens are really annoyed, they'll "mail-bomb" you: in the worst case, fill your mail-box with 8-megabyte garbage files. This is only likely to happen if you spam dozens of news-groups with commercial advertising. Don't.

And don't be put off: there is gold among the dross, and the worst pile-up on the infobahn is a lot less gory than one in 3D.