Please think about what you are doing...

[Dana Myers]

  I enjoy most the mail I get from info-c. A lot of truly useful information
regarding the C programming language is submitted. There is also a lot of
trash mail that everyone on the list needs to wade through to get to the
good stuff. Aside from deleting all messages except the ones from Doug Gwyn
and henry Spencer and a few others, I have no choice but to wade through
the (seemingly endless) stream of "I compiled this and it didn't work, HELP!"
and "How come you can be on the standards committe and I can't?" and even the
periodic "They had a really good way of doing that in Fortran (or Cobol or
Modula or Pascal or PDP-11 assembler or whatever the first language you ever
programmed in was)". The worst kind of message is like the one that follows:


> From: "Peter J. Holsberg" <pjh at mccc.uucp>
> Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
> Subject: Re: Associativity -- what is it?
> Message-ID: <241 at mccc.UUCP>
> Date: 25 Feb 88 17:59:00 GMT
> To:       info-c at brl-smoke.arpa
> 
> 
> Dave,
> 
> Your clear English-language statements reflect exactly the way I learned
> it, too.
> -- 
> Peter Holsberg                  UUCP: {rutgers!}princeton!mccc!pjh
> Technology Division             CompuServe: 70240,334
> Mercer College                  GEnie: PJHOLSBERG
> Trenton, NJ 08690               Voice: 1-609-586-4800


  This is a "me too" message to Dave. Dave who?? And why is Dave's address
"info-c at brl-smoke.arpa"??

  PLEASE! Think about the messages you send. This is a mailing list. If
you 'reply' to mail you get, it might easily go to everyone else, too. As
explained before, this costs people money and time, and time costs money, too.
PLEASE! Try to solve your own programming bugs before you ask everybody to
help you. PLEASE!!  Practice just a little care in what you send, since the
people who really can answer those questions may stop participating if it
gets to be too time consuming munching through the junk mail on this list.

  This message is example of another kind of net-clogger. A peeve! ;-)

Dana H. Myers