Nagios-users Mailing List "Rules"

I'm crossposting this to nagios-announce, as some of you might not 
notice it on nagios-users...

A lot of junk messages have been seen on the nagios-users mailing 
list over the last two or three weeks.  Flame wars have erupted over 
feature requests, issues with new users not reading the manual, what 
email clients users send messages with, HTML and long sigs in 
messages, etc.  It's getting downright ridiculous.  

There are over 2,000 people currently subscribed to the nagios-users 
list.  I'm quite sure that 99+% of us don't want to see this junk in 
our inboxes.  I've enjoyed reading spam messages about enlargement 
pills more than postings on the nagios-users list recently.

To those of you who feel the need to bash some user because they 
posted a "stupid" question, use the wrong email client, or whatever.. 
I say get over it.  There will always be people who send HTML email 
to the list, have a long sig/disclaimer auto-attached to their 
postings by their mail server, don't RTFM before posting questions, 
dislike Nagios, etc.  You can always choose to not read or respond to 
messages you don't care for (for whatever reason).  You can't control 
what other people do or don't use/say/do, but you can control your 
response to them.  

Remember that you were once new to Nagios, you haven't always read 
the manuals (and still don't), and you've done plenty of "stupid" 
things and asked plenty of "stupid" questions in the past too.  The 
nagios-users list is supposed to be about Nagios and *helping* people 
to use Nagios.  That includes both newbies and more seasoned users.  
If we were all experts about Nagios, there wouldn't be any questions 
and we wouldn't need the list.  Take your flame wars, etc. elsewhere.

As the playground nanny, I guess I need to enforce some basic rules 
of etiquette on the list.  So here's the deal...  If you...

1. start, or significantly contribute to or participate in a flame 
war
2. deride or ridicule users for things they have or have not done
3. post messages that are generally mean, unsavory, etc.

...the following things will happen...

1. I'll ban your email address and/or entire company's domain from 
posting messages to the list
2. After ~2 weeks or so I'll remove the posting restriction
3. If you get banned again for reasons mentioned above, it'll 
probably be permanent

This is supposed to be a public list and I hate to do this, but I 
feel I *have* to in order to keep this list useable.  I won't allow 
offenders to remain unchecked at the of risk alienating the majority 
of list members.




Ethan Galstad,
Nagios Developer
---
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.nagios.org



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