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How to Use openXPS Mailing Lists
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Read This! |
General Advice |
Version and Platform Info |
Bugs |
This page explains how to use the openXPS mailing lists efficiently.
Although you may choose to not follow these guidelines, please don't be
surprizied if you get no answers to your question in this case. In particular,
although several openXPS users and developers usually reply to the questions on the
mailing list all of them have by now an almost-unconditional instinct to
delete the messages not conforming to these guidelines without reading them.
In short, following these simple guidelines makes life much simpler for both
the users and the developers. Not doing it can result in a very frustrating
experience. Please do read this page carefully!
Please read the openXPS documentation (manual, install.txt,
FAQ) and, if possible, theopenXPS-users archive, before
posting.
If you don't find an answer to your question and decide to post, please
try to give a specific, meaningful subject line to your posts so people
subscribing to 381 other mailing lists can pick them out easily, and to help
indexing and archiving. The subject line must be descriptive which something
like "I get ERRORS, HELP!!!!" (real life example of a message from my
mailbox from today) is not.
When writing the body of your message, please
- Ensure that you're using plain text, not HTML
- Set your word wrap to 75 or less
- Use English as correct as possible and, at the very least, use
English and not some other language
- Avoid multiple (more than 2, anyhow) exclamation or interrogation
marks -- this simply gives bad impression about you without conveying
any other information
Please don't post (big) attachments to the mailing list. If you have something
to show (a screenshot in general), please put it on the web somewhere and post
a link. Remember, the bandwidth does count.
So to summarize, the more you help other people, the more they
are likely to help you :-) Personally if I can't answer a
question in a couple of minutes or less -- due to the need to
shuffle someone's bunch of attached files or whatever -- I often ignore it, and
I'm sure I'm not the only one to filter messages in this way.
Thank you!
A question or bug report without version and platform information is useless.
Unless our crystall ball is in an exceptionally good working state on the day
of your posting, we generally have no idea what are you speaking about.
So please ALWAYS mention your platform (this includes the architecture
and the compiler used for building openXPS) and openXPS version,
on the subject line or in the body of the mesage.
Generally it's much better to show a little bit of source with
the code that causes the problem, rather than sending an entire
program that people then have to sift through (nobody has time to do this
anyhow). Ideally, please try to reproduce your problem in one of the samples.