Dear Member: I would like to draw your attention and also seek your cooperation in ensuring that the following basic guidelines are adhered to while posting a message or taking part in a discussion on the LIS-Forum. I have been wanting to bring this to your attention for a while now but somehow couldn't do so. In fact, I have been writing individually to several members who are active on the list to pay attention to some basic guidelines of any discussion list etiquette. The points mentioned below and a few other points, covering the basic rules and guidelines for our discussion list, will be included in the confirmatory mail that is sent to all new registrations and also in the monthly reminders that the list sends to all the members. This way, the members will be reminded of most essential dos and don'ts of this list. 1. Almost every posting / message meant for distribution is received as multiple parts, which means that such mails contain attachments apart from the actual content. When the mails with such attachments are opened, they will typically appear as shown below, Parts/Attachments: 1.1 OK 33 lines Text (charset: ISO-8859-1) 1.2 Shown 10 lines Text (charset: ISO-8859-1) 2 Shown 4 lines Text ---------------------------------------- Although mails with above type of attachments are harmless, such attachments can be easily avoided by ensuring that your e-mail client software (used for reading and sending e-mails) is set to send mails in plain text. Sending mails in plain text format will reduce the size of the mails. This reduction will be to the extent of about few hundred bytes. However, if you take into consideration that there are close to 3000 members on this list and on an average, 2/3 messages are circulated each working day then the reduction of size of each mail to LIS-Forum even to the extent of few hundred bytes will be quite significant. So, please do ensure that messages meant for LIS-Forum are in plain text format only. Sending mails in plain text format is quite simple. By default, your mail client may be composing messages as color and graphics. This needs to be changed to compose messages as plain text. This change can be done in the general preferences of your mail client. As a policy, mails with non textual attachments (.doc / PDF etc) are discarded. 2. Whenever a discussion takes place, members who are responding to the earlier mails should include only a portion of the mail in their replies and the inclusion should be at the top. This will enable the readers to easily follow the discussion. What is happening now is that the replies come at the top followed by the full length original mail. Many a times the entire digest is included in the replies. This not only makes the discussion difficult to follow but it also increases the size of the mail substantially. 3. Although the forum is meant for discussing issues related to LIS and related fields, occasionally, it could also be used for seeking help / guidance / suggestions from the fellow members. While doing so, please do ensure that sufficient background details provided about the query and adequate effort has been made to find solution for the problem at hand. In other words, the forum should be used only as the last resort. 4. Every posting should include complete signature. Thanks for your cooperation. - Moderator