Newsgroups: sci.engr.television.advanced
Subject: Re: Poor Responses
References: <[email protected]>
"Uno-Hoo!"  writes:

> Looking back through the postings on this NG I am astonished at the number
> of queries that have been posted without a response.  Is this just an
> unhelpful NG or are there more people with problems than people with answers
> subscribing?!!

There seem to be much more clueless newbies and those who ask than
real professionals who have time to answer those questions.
And most of the newbie questions are so baddly formed that very
few even bother to answer to them. If the question is very general
broad without good indication what is exactly what is asked and does
not include the necesssary background information (technical details,
information on country where the one who ask is etc.)

For exampel questions like "what is the nearest place to buy
for a cable for connecting my whatever to my TV?" is quite
pointless because the one who ask the question did not tell
the information needed to answer:
- place where the the one who ask is
  (without even knowing the counry it is practically
   impossible to tell the nearest place to buy anything)
- did not specify what he/she was looking for
  (not telling what type of cable exactly was needed or
  information which can be used to determine what is needed).

I have written the following guidelines to post to Usenet
newsgroups to http://www.us-epanorama.net/newsgroups.html
If everybody were following those quidelines (at least
somewhat), those newsgroups would be much more helpful tool.

Some guidelines to posting to newsgroups
There are some things to remember when reading and posting to Usenet
newsgroups. Following the generla guidelines keeps everybody happier: 

- Do not post questions before you have read the FAQ list of the
  newsgroup (if such exist) 
- Send your article as pure ASCII text (Turn off all HTML) 
- Do not quote more than few lines when replying to articles 
- So not send stupid articles without any valuable information 
- Be prepared to follow the discussion in newsgroup after your question,
  please not request the answers through e-mail 
- Please do not send your question to more than one newsgroup at one time 
- Use a subject which describes what your article is about 
- If you quote the original article on your reply, remove as much of the
  quoted text as you possibly can to make the original article basics
  understood. A general guideline is that you should not quote more of
  the original text than what you have written yourself. 
- Your own signature line should be no more than four lines in height. 
- Look at your post after you write it and make sure that it says what
  you want it to say. 
- If you want someone to answer you, be sure to use a real e-mail
  address 
- If you want someone to visit your Web page, please include its URL
  accurately. If you write URLs it is prefered to have the http://
  prefix in the address so that readers with web browser as their news
  reading tool can simply click it as a link. 
- If you plan to tell about some web page on the Usenet, tehn write a
  good description of it before posting. If the whole writeup is "check
  out this link," it's definitely annoys the readers of the newsgroups
  and does not give any expected results in getting new users for the
  web pages. 
- Make sure your editor is set so that its column width is less than 80
  characters. Otherwise, your text may wrap around in unpredictable ways
  and the post won't be readable by many of us. 

Remeber that most newsgroups are worldwide in coverage. That means
that criticizing someone's English, making nationalistic remarks,
personal insults, and criticizing another poster's intelligence are
invitations to pointless flame wars. Remeber that if you write a good
article, it is going to be understood by most of the people who read
it, but be prepared that there are almost always some people who do
not understand your article completely right. 

If you're asking for advice, please give some indication of where you
live. Telephone and electrical systems are not the same all over the
world. If you are looking for a palce to buy something, then it is a
good idea to tell in what country you live in so that you don't get
half dozen recommendations where to biy the thing from other side of
the world. 

Take a note that computer equipment that will be used to read these
messages is anything but uniform. Any extensions that your computer
has to support various character sets will not always be reliably
transmitted or displayed at the other end. So avoid fancy superscript
characters, degrees temperature, greek letters, and line drawing
characters like the IBM PC extended character set. If you try to make
ASCII drawings to your text, please meake sure that they are made so
that tyehy display correctly on other people also (draw them using
fixed witdth fonts and suign space characters instead of tabulator). 

You should also consider where a poster is when they request the
closest source for some product or information. Not everybody has a
Radio Shack in the nearest shopping mall. A common problem is that the
toll free 800 numbers common in North America are not easily or
cheaply accessible from the rest of the world. Look closely at the
orginators domain address to see if they can affordably contact your
recommended source. 

Keep in mind that various systems and standards are different around
the world. Household power voltages and frequencies are different, and
the techniques and regulations to deal with wiring are different
enough to cause safety problems if you try to use the wrong one. Video
systems (orginally tied to the power line frequency) are also widely
different around the world. Different scan rates and encoding systems
make things incompatible. 

Not only are the systems different, so is the jargon used to describe
them. And what was written as 4.7 k ohms, might by (from the
requirements of the schematic drafting standards) be given as 4k7
ohms. 


-- 
Tomi Engdahl (http://www.iki.fi/then/)
Take a look at my electronics web links and documents at 
http://www.epanorama.net/