[ E-mail | Chat & ICQ | Guestbooks | Newsgroups & Lists | The Lingo ]

Hi. I'm Eric Schlichting, I'm a junior, and for two years I've worked the help desk in the computer lab on the second floor of the student union. Every September a few thousand new people get their first e-mail account at once, and every October I spend half my shifts explaining why their roommate's mom is upset, why a professor didn't answer, or why they got kicked out of a chat room. So I started handing out a sheet. This is the sheet, grown up.

"Netiquette" just means manners for the Net. None of it is law. All of it comes down to one idea: there's a real person on the other end, reading your words on a screen with no face and no tone of voice to help. Write for that person.

Write a real subject line. "Question about Tuesday's lab" gets read. "hi" gets read last. "(no subject)" to a professor may not get read at all.

DON'T TYPE IN ALL CAPITALS. See how that felt? On the Net it's shouting. If you need to stress one word, put *stars* around it.

When you reply, trim. Your mail program puts the whole old message under your reply with little > marks. Cut it down to the lines you're actually answering, and put your answer after them, so it reads top to bottom like a conversation. Nobody needs a three-word reply sitting on top of six pages of old mail.

Keep your signature short. Four lines or fewer is the old rule. Your name, maybe your e-mail and one good quote. Not your whole class schedule.

Don't send attachments people didn't ask for. A big file can tie up somebody's modem for ten minutes, and not everybody can open a Word file. And don't open attachments you weren't expecting, even from friends. The Melissa virus last March came as a Word file from people you knew, and it mailed itself to the first fifty people in your address book. The lab was a zoo for a week.

Chain letters and virus warnings: don't forward them. No, nobody is tracking your forwards and paying you for them. No, a sick kid's family is not getting a penny for every copy. And the scary warning about the e-mail that will erase your hard drive if you just read it, the one called "Good Times," has been going around since 1994 and has never once been real. If a warning tells you to "forward this to everyone you know," that's how you know it's junk. If you're really worried, ask us at the help desk.

Writing to a group? Use BCC. Put the addresses in the BCC box instead of To, and nobody gets everybody else's address. Your friends' e-mail addresses aren't yours to hand out to forty strangers.

Think before Reply All. Do all twenty people on the list need to know that you, too, can come to the meeting?

Sleep on angry mail. Write it, don't send it, read it again in the morning. An angry letter on the Net is called a flame, and you'll never get it back once it's gone. It can be printed out and passed around. Assume everything you write could end up on a bulletin board. Your school account especially.

Jokes don't carry. Sarcasm that sounds hilarious in your head reads as mean on a screen. That's what the little sideways faces are for. Tip your head to the left: :-) means I'm smiling, ;-) means I'm kidding, :-( means I'm sad. One per letter is plenty.

Lurk first. When you walk into a room, whether it's an AOL chat room or an IRC channel, read for a few minutes before you type. Every room has its own jokes and its own regulars. Figure out what they're talking about before you change the subject.

Don't open with "a/s/l?" Age, sex, location. It's the first thing half the people online type, and it's the fastest way to be ignored in any room that's actually about something. Talk about the topic. People who want to tell you about themselves will.

Don't flood. Typing the same line over and over, or pasting in thirty lines at once, scrolls everyone else's conversation off the screen. On IRC it will get you kicked out of the channel, and you'll deserve it.

ICQ: ask before you add somebody to your contact list, and don't send the same person twelve messages in a row. Everyone in the lab knows that "uh-oh" sound, and nobody wants it twelve times while they're writing a paper. If someone sets themselves to Away or Do Not Disturb, believe them.

Stay safe. Never give your full name, phone number, address, dorm room or class schedule to somebody you've only met in a chat room. People online are not always who they say they are. If you do decide to meet someone in person, meet in a public place in the daytime and tell a friend where you'll be. I'm not being your mother. I'm being the guy who has had to walk more than one freshman to the campus police office.

A guestbook is somebody's front porch. You're a guest. Act like one.

• Say something about the page. "Cool page!" is nice. "I made your chili and my roommates ate the whole pot" makes somebody's week.
• It's not a billboard. Put your own address with your name if you like, once. Don't sign every guestbook on the Web with nothing but an ad for your page.
• Sign once. If the page didn't come back right away, wait a minute before you hit Submit again. Owners have to delete the extra copies by hand.
• No giant pictures, no blinking text. Some guestbooks let you type HTML into your entry. Don't make the owner's guestbook take two minutes to load.
• Disagree privately. If you think the page is wrong about something, e-mail the owner. Don't start a fight on their porch.
• Kids: first name only, and never your address or your school.

Running a guestbook of your own? Somebody over in SiliconValley tested a whole pile of free ones for seven months: The Free Stuff Test Bench.

Read the FAQ first. Almost every group and list has one, and the question you're about to ask is probably question 1. Then read for a week or two before you post. Stay on the topic of the group. Don't post the same message to ten groups at once. And when you join a mailing list, save the welcome letter, because it tells you how to get off the list. Sending "UNSUBSCRIBE ME" to all four hundred members is how everybody learns your name for the wrong reason.

newbies and old hands since September 1998

Questions, or a manners problem I didn't cover? Come see me at the lab, or write:
[email protected]
Eric Schlichting · Last updated Thursday, September 16, 1999
Feel free to print this out for your roommate. That's what it's for.