VirtualMV/Web Development/Web Site Issues/Culture and Netiquette/Content

Netiquette
Netiquette (Internet Ettiquette), is the set of informal shared rules that govern people’s behaviour on-line. If a user is irresponsible or discourteous to others or abuse the resources that allow them and others to share information and communicate, then that user runs the risk of incurring the wrath of the Internet community. Netizens will, individually or collectively, educate, inform and sometimes even ostracize the user. In the worst cases netizens may contact the user’s Network Administrator and inform them of the abuses, and often the user may lose their network account. Generally, if you use common sense, and apologise if you make a mistake, then you will travel the Information superhighway safely.

http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/help/activities/netiquette.html

General rules

 * Mind your manners and consider other people’s feelings at all times. Never say anything over the wires that you would not say to a person’s face.
 * Think before your write. Don’t say something you will be sorry for later. These documents could be permanent. Treat every post as though you were writing to your mother! Remember other people may read the email.
 * Be wise in your choice of words. Verbal opinions expressed on paper lack the nuances of spoken language and body language and are often taken the wrong way by the recipient. You can indicate emotion using "emoticons" such as the smiley :-) or the ironic smiley ;-) . Refer to Smileys which contains many more emoticons, however you should be aware that few emoticons apart from the two above are in general usage.
 * Don’t talk about anybody in a post and certainly don’t betray a confidence. Don’t forward someone’s mail without their permission.
 * Don’t send lines longer than 70 characters. Although this is changing many people still use DOS based systems and many gateways truncate extra characters.
 * DON’T SEND A MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS IT’S HARD TO READ.
 * Use normal capitalisation. All lower case can be insulting to some people.
 * You can use CAPS for emphasis.When e-mail was text based we used the underscore key at the beginning and end of a phrase to indicate that it is a source or to indicate italics. e.g. "Jerry Mander’s _In Absence of the Sacred_ is a book on questions we should have asked about technology".
 * With email it is not as important to use correct spelling and grammer as it is for a letter, but you should try to keep your spelling and grammar as correct as possible as this is a source of annoyance to some people.
 * Avoid Vague Subjects