Guidelines for Manifold-L

These guidelines will be posted from time to time to help keep Manifold-L a constructive discussion list.

Searching the Archive

It is good form to search the Manifold-L archive  before posting a question or starting a new thread.  The topic may have been already discussed exhaustively.  To search the archive, visit 

http://lists.directionsmag.com/discussion/list.php?f=29 

The Search link in the upper right just above the table of list messages allows you to search the Manifold-L archive.

Posting Messages

• Your email address must be subscribed to the list to post to the list from that address. This is an anti-spam measure.
• Post questions, answers and discussion about Manifold System GIS products.
• A posting to Manifold-L is a posting to other Manifold users like yourself. It is a not a posting to manifold.net. Do not post email to Manifold-L that should be sent directly to manifold.net Sales or Tech Support.
• Short announcements of job openings, new services or products of specific interest to Manifold users (that work with Manifold products) are OK.
• General announcements of products of general GIS interest are not OK.  Use other lists and newsgroups to make such announcements.
•  Before posting a question, check to see if your question has already been answered:
  • Search the list by visiting http://lists.directionsmag.com/discussion/search.php?f=29 
  • Visit the Manifold support pages / FAQs at http://www.manifold.net/support/support_set.html 
  • Check the Knowledge Base at http://www.manifold.net/support/kb_set.html 
• Post by sending mail to Manifold-L@lists.directionsmag.com  Your email address will appear in the posting. 
• Anonymous posting is not allowed.
• Messages composed entirely of HTML are rejected.
• Messages over 30KB are rejected.

Basic List Etiquette

• Do not post any email attachments. vCards are acceptable, but discouraged since they use bandwidth.
• Never post a message that asks for a receipt.
• When leaving the office for a while, either turn off your autoresponder or temporarily unsubscribe from the list. Otherwise, your email address will generate lots of "I'm away from the office" emails in response to list postings.
• Do not cross post. If your message/question is not important enough to address to this list specifically it is not important enough to send to the many people who read this list.
• Do not post to the list with a cc: to your intended recipient as a way of airing private conversations in public.
• Do not post to the list if you want to communicate with one individual. Send that person an email directly.
• Send email to manifold-l-owner@lists.directionsmag.com only if you are having trouble with subscribing or unsubscribing to the list. Do not send tech support questions to manifold-l-owner@lists.directionsmag.com!
• Do not send questions or requests for tech support to people who post frequently on the list.  Participation on the list is voluntary.  If you have a question, post it to the list and see if anyone responds. 
• When posting a question that may draw lots of responses, offer to "sum". Respondents should reply to the author directly. The author will then accumulate responses and post a summation of relevant points back to the list.

Responding to Messages

• Reply to a posting either with a Reply directly to the author or a Reply to All to include the entire list if you think your reply should be read by all subscribers.
• Do not automatically include the entire original posting in your reply. Take a moment to edit your reply so that only those snippets of the original message required to maintain meaning are retained.
• Respond with as much specificity as you can. For example, "See the 'XYZ topic' in Help" is more helpful than "It's somewhere in the manual."
• Offer to take a thread offline if you think a discussion is no longer of general interest to the List.
• If an attachment is required for your response, send it via a direct email and not via a response to the entire List.

Manifold-L is not the same as manifold.net

• Manifold-L is a forum for users operated by www.directionsmag.com  - It is not operated by manifold.net and has no affiliation with the company that creates Manifold System.
• Some manifold.net employees have volunteered to help administer the list until directionsmag.com or a Manifold user group can organize different list administrators. Any list administration tasks done by such volunteers are done on the personal time of such employees after their regular jobs.  Please be patient with any admin questions.
• Except for some staffers who may participate in Manifold-L the way any other user does, Manifold-L is not generally monitored by manifold.net. If you have a question for manifold.net, send it to sales@manifold.net  for sales issues and to tech@manifold.net for technical support issues.
• Sending a question to Manifold tech support and also cc'ing Manifold-L (or sending a note to Manifold-L and cc'ing tech support) will guarantee that tech support will not respond to your question. Since tech support incidents are chargeable and/or limited, tech support assumes that if you have cc'd the list you do not want to use up an incident but are sending an "FYI" to tech support.
• Send bug reports directly to tech@manifold.net so they can be logged and eventually repaired.
• Send any requests for new features to  sales@manifold.net so they can be logged and assigned a priority based on how many other people request that feature. Manifold-L is a great place to discuss new ideas with other users but it is not a replacement for voting directly with manifold.net.
• When suggestions are sent directly to sales@manifold.net, if they are also "cc'd" to any third party they are excluded from the voting process.   This is to discourage politics and grandstanding and also to encourage voting samples where each vote for a new feature has independently arisen.

General

• No profanity or abusive or derogatory language will be tolerated. If you disagree strongly with something, calmly debate the idea or the statement with persuasive facts and logic - do not attack the person.  If you find yourself discussing a particular person, his or her behavior, characteristics or views, you have just gone outside the boundaries of the list.  If you have a problem with someone abusing the list guidelines, do not launch a meta-discussion about that individual in the list.  Instead, contact the list owner.  This is also not a list in which discussion about individual people is appropriate.  Keep the conversation to Manifold System products.
• This list is for discussion of Manifold System products and those technologies immediately relevant to Manifold System. It is not a list for discussion of politics, other products, Linux vs. the Rest of the World,  other topics, etc.  For example, it's OK to bring up a subject about what is good hardware for running Manifold but not OK to run endless threads about multiprocessor vs. uniprocessor architectures in general.   Keep it focused. 
• This is a public list that is archived. Anyone visiting the list archives at directionsmag.com can read your comments. Some third party services might archive your comments for decades.
• Invalid email addresses that are subscribed to the list will be summarily dropped. If you have subscribed to the list and are not getting a feed, check to make sure the email you subscribed can receive mail. If you experience a mail service interruption, resubscribe to the list (your email may have been dropped by the listbot if messages were undeliverable during the interruption). 

Subscribing and Unsubscribing

To subscribe to Manifold-L, send mail from the email address that is to be subcribed to  manifold-l-subscribe@lists.directionsmag.com  

You can subscribe to the digest version by sending mail to manifold-l-digest-subscribe@lists.directionsmag.com 

After subscribing, monitor your inbox.  Mail from Manifold-L may appear to be junk mail to some spam filters, which may filter out or reject your inbound Manifold-L mail.  If the mail is rejected, the server will automatically drop you from the distribution.   Hotmail allows you to open a message that was filtered out and to then check a box to indicate that message was not spam so that the filter can learn to accept the mail.

To unsubscribe, send mail to manifold-l-unsubscribe@lists.directionsmag.com 

To unsubscribe from the digest version, send mail to manifold-l-digest-unsubscribe@lists.directionsmag.com 

Any "unsubscribe" message must come from the email address that was used to subscribe to the list.  For example, if you have subscribed using "tom.jones@besthost.com" you cannot later send an email from your new "tom-jones@betterhost.com" to unsubscribe the email address at "tom.jones@besthost.com". 

Automated Help

To get automated help on using the list, send an email to manifold-l-help@lists.directionsmag.com

Advanced users may want to read more about the mail list software used.  See http://ezmlm.area.com/ezman-0.32/ 

If you have any suggestions to improve the above guidelines, please send them to webmaster@manifold.net

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