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Newsgroups |
Students taking 212 tend to come in with a wide range of internet background. As a result, many students are unaware of the various protocols that experienced net users expect everyone to follow. There are reasons behind these rules, which will be given where possible. Also, there are valid reasons to break them in certain circumstances. However, for the duration of this course, we expect you to obey the guidelines below wherever possible. Penalties are generally informal, except where noted. Be aware, however, that regardless of the visible reminders and reprimands you receive, you can be annoying the people that will be teaching you, helping you, and evaluating you throughout the semester.
Well, you're all pretty well used to email at this point. However, you can almost always improve your style. In general, the points addressed in the section about usenet apply to email. There are a few email-specifc points, however.
By this point you've already heard that you can mail cs212@cs.cornell.edu for various purposes. Just keep in mind all this does is forward your mail to the entire course staff at once. There's not some omniscient instantaneous geek in the sky answering your questions, so be considerate.
If you've got a question, you have many options: usenet, the mailing list, emailing some in particular, coming to office hours, coming to consulting, etc. Disregarding the real world for a moment, questions with answers that benefit others should probably go to the newsgroup. If the staff members reading the group don't feel qualified to answer, they will likely bring the question up on the mailing list. (However, we are mostly human, so if something goes unanswered please remind us.) Questions that apply only to you should go to the mailing list, as should anything that you don't want other students knowing about. Please avoid mailing the list just because you're embarassed to ask something in public--we've all asked stupid questions before and will do so again. Sending email to one particular member of the course staff is at your discretion, although it generally doesn't hurt to send to the list in such cases.
It's generally best not to email us bits of your code that aren't working. (If the code in question doesn't relate to a problem set, see the section about posting code to the newsgroup, which is the appropriate action to take.) Consulting hours exist so you can get in-depth help like that. However, if you must mail code, make sure you do it well: it should be indented properly and commented adequately, the difficulty you are having should be carefully explained, etc.
Some of you may be completely unfamiliar with newsgroups. In short, they are public forum in which people post messages for everyone to see. We have two newsgroups for the class at the moment, courtesy of CIT. They are internal to the University, and while there is no guarantee that the outside world will not see your posts, you are in general safe from having your words archived forever for all to read.
The first is cornell.class.cs212. It is for discussion, questions, and comments related directly to class material. (For example, clarification of an assignment, questions about lecture or section, etc.) If a conversation "thread" drifts away from these criteria, please move it to a more appropriate group. In addition to allowing those students who so choose to only read the "important" posts, this facilitates the course staff being able to answer your questions as soon as possible.
This brings us to the second group, cornell.class.cs212.talk. Pretty much everything is on-topic in ".talk", as it is often called. The group was created because 212 students, staff, and alumni tend to be a friendly group, and discussions ranging from t-shirts to the computer industry were interrupting students trying to get help in the main group. So questions about computer science in general, chatting, holy wars, and the like should be confined to .talk. There are often other appropriate groups in the cornell.* hierarchy, but they are all pretty much dead, so conversation tends to stay in .talk.
This is the most important and least bendable rule. Code relating to problem sets is not to be posted. Infractions are generally considered violations of the Policy on Academic Integrity and thus can carry severe punishments. If you are unsure if a posting is ok, don't risk it. This does not, however, prohibit asking questions about why a bit of code acts in a certain way, as long as the topic in question comes from lecture or section, not a problem set.
This is an easy one. In general, articles should not be posted to both cs212 and cs212.talk. The possible exception to this is if you are starting a discussion that is off-topic but want to make sure everyone is aware of it. For example, towards the end of the semester someone will probably spearhead an effort to make t-shirts. It would be reasonable to post a short notice in the main group informing everyone that a t-shirt discussion will take place in .talk. On the other hand, you could include both groups in your Newsgroups: header, but if you do, make sure to set Followup-To: to "cornell.class.cs212.talk" so that everyone's responses don't clutter the main group. (Or set your Followup-To: to "poster" if you'd like responses by email. Remember that it's nice to post a summary of the comments if you've requested them by email.)
In general, it's not necessary to post a public reply and send a copy via email. If you feel it's apprpriate, however, go ahead, but make sure that your software includes a notification such as "This article has been posted and mailed". If it doesn't, you'll have to add one by hand. Don't forget.
It is considered rude to post in a public forum something you have received in private email. Understood?
Don't worry, we don't expect you to spell correctly. We don't even expect you to run a spell checker before posting (although we certainly won't complain). However, this is not an excuse to act like you've never seen the English language before. Try to avoid being completely lazy (standard acronyms such as "IMHO" for "In My Humble Opinion" are fine, but things like "ur" for "you are" make the reader spend far more time deciphering your post than you save by not having to type as much), please. And capitalization is much appreciated.
Like your code, posts should not have excessively long lines. This generally means 72 characters per line, 80 maximum. If your software can't handle this, get new software or expect to be ignored. It's just plain annoying for the reader to have to deal with long lines.
In addition to meeting the line length criterion above, there are a few other recommendations for signatures. Short signatures are best, and anything longer than four lines is generally inappropriate. Also, please try to include the correct signature delimiter, which is two dashes followed by a space on a line by itself. Some programs do this automatically, while in others you have to include it in the signature itself. Remember that the space at the end of the line is important. (In case you're wondering the reason for following the de facto standard, it's because good software recognizes anything following "-- " as a signature and can then display it in a different color and automatically delete it from replies.)
When replying to a post, it is important to include text from the previous post so that the person reading knows what you are talking about. Doing this correctly is a bit of an art that some people seem to have difficulty mastering. In addition, there is often much debate about quoting. However, regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, we expect you to abide by the guidelines that follow.
One of the important tasks is removing, or "snipping", the part of the original text that you are not replying to. Also, if the text you want to quote is especially long, you may want to delete it and instead include a brief summary or something to remind the reader of the topic. In addition, you should put your text below the quoted text. Although some people prefer putting the quoted text at the bottom, this is considerably harder on the reader. (You're going to have to trust me about this; I promise I've read more usenet and email articles than you have, and there are few things more annoying.)
Another thing that makes it easier for the reader to follow the flow of a discussion is the fact that most newsreaders can figure out what is a reply to what and make a graphical representation of the conversation. They do this by using some ugly-looking headers (Message-ID: and References:), which means that you can't just pick any post to reply to even if it has the same Subject:, nor can you send out a new post and just retype the Subject: line.
