JADE Newsgroups — Guidelines

Please consider and respect the following guidelines when using the JADE Newsgroups:

Notifications

1. Jade Software Corporation Ltd (Jade) does not offer any formal support in the JADE newsgroups.
2. Jade does not necessarily endorse, support, or agree with the opinions or statements expressed in any of the newsgroups. Any information placed online is solely the view of those who post it.
3. These are Newsgroups. By participating, you grant to Jade the unrestricted right to use, reproduce, modify, translate, display, perform, transmit and distribute any material you post to a newsgroup in any present or future medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes.
4. Messages found in violation of the Newsgroup Guidelines are subject to cancellation without notice.

Rules

1. Do not advocate or engage in unlawful activities.
2. Do not post copyrighted material without permission of the author.
3. Do not post anything that is libelous, abusive, hateful, an invasion of anyone's privacy, harmful to other users, or harmful to the business interests of Jade.
4. Do not cross-post or multi-post your message. Post your message to the single most appropriate group. Place all of the information relevant to your post in the message body. Do not assume that everyone can see or will read the subject line.
5. Do not attach data or files to your message.
6. Do not post HTML messages. Post plain text messages.
7. Do not post product announcements or advertisements to inappropriate groups. There are several newsgroups specifically for third party tools where you may post relevant product announcements.

Etiquette — Style

1. Keep quoted text to a minimum. When quoting a previous post, edit out the non-relevant parts of the message. Remove salutations and signatures. A good rule of thumb is, there should more new text than quoted text.
2. Separate paragraphs with a blank line. Also, separate your text from quoted text with a blank line.
3. If you include quoted text in your message, be considerate and clean up the margins and line breaks in the quoted material. Quoted text is typically preceded by a character indicating that it is quoted, and this additional character increases the line length. The longer line length can cause the message editor to re-parse the line and insert new line breaks that conflict with the existing line breaks.
4. Wrap lines at seventy characters. Due to word wrapping, longer lines can make your message very difficult to read.
5. Spelling and grammar count. The only part of you that the members of the newsgroup see is your typed words. Sending a poorly written message is like giving a speech in a dirty shirt. Of course, if your native language is something other than English, this consideration is reduced.
6. Do not write messages in all capital letters. Use normal capitalization.

Etiquette — Content

1. Stay on topic. When you post a reply to a message ask yourself, "Does the subject line describe the contents of my message?" If the answer is no, you probably want to revise your message or modify the subject. Modifying the subject helps other members of the newsgroup determine if your message or thread has information of interest to them.
2. Move off-topic discussions to e-mail. Often a technical thread will evolve into a friendly chat on some other, unrelated topic. This is good because it is part of what makes these newsgroups a community. When the discussion has moved away from the original topic to the point that it is likely no longer of interest to the greater community, please move the conversation to e-mail.
3. Do not ask for assistance via email. Saying, "I don't read this group often, so please mail your replies" is essentially saying, "My time is more important than your time." If someone is willing to spend the time to answer your question, you should be willing to spend the time necessary to retrieve the answer. Getting one-on-one help via e-mail is also known as consulting, and consulting does not come free.
4. Write conservatively; read forgivingly. Communication in a pure text medium, such as a newsgroup, is prone to misunderstanding, often due to the lack of non-verbal cues such as inflections, facial expression and body language. Given this, it is best to be conservative with expressions of anger and sarcasm when writing. When reading, assume good intent; if a message can be taken two ways, assume the friendliest meaning.
5. Double check *where* you are sending your message. It can be very embarrassing to accidentally post a message to a newsgroup when you meant to send it via mail.
6. Remember that your words will last a long time. With news archiving services, the whole world can read your words, long after you have written them. Think twice about what you say.

Newsgroup Tips

1. Do some homework. Read the manual. Check the online help. Review examples schemas to see if any are doing something similar to what you need.
2. Determine to which newsgroup you should post your question. Check the messages that are already on the newsgroup to see if others have asked about your problem recently.
3. Use a meaningful subject line. Instead of saying that you need help urgently, summarize the problem in your subject line. If you are getting an error message that you need help understanding, put the text of the error, or a summary thereof, in your subject.
4. Try to ask one main question in each message. A message with a laundry list of questions is less likely to get the same attention as a focused message with a few short, related questions.
5. Don't ask questions in a way that require all people to answer in the negative, because you won't get an answer. State the problem and ask for help. For example: "Has anyone ever had problems interfacing JADE with Mongol, release 2.9 when running under Windows XY?" Everyone will skip your message because they do not have such a configuration.
6. Do not be annoyed by receiving a half-dozen conditional answers from different people. Make it work for you by noting the suggestions that are not pertinent to your immediate situation. They may be, sooner than you think.
7. Be prepared for follow up. The people who are going to be responding to your message will be trying to recognize what the problem might be based solely on what you write. If they don't recognize the problem from your initial description, then you will be asked to provide more details: operating system version, product version, sample code, etc.
8. Don't assume that nobody cares to help you if you get no answers. Ask again, with the timing of the second request determined by the urgency of the problem. State that this is a second request.
9. You catch more flies with honey. Remember both the employees of the company providing support and the loyal customers who enhance the support are there because they like the company and the product. If you have a legitimate complaint, it doesn't do any good to make your entry onto the newsgroup by stating that the product is terrible, the company is criminal, and the users of the product are idiots, and then going on to demand assistance or you will resort to legal action. Stick to the facts, eliminate the hyperbole, and register your complaints through the appropriate channels.

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