Before you post any questions or answers to an Email User's Group, Forum, or any of the Newsgroups, it is a good idea to learn a few of the rules of etiquette, that apply to posting in these types of groups. Keep in mind as you compose your questions, or answers to other people, that many of these groups may be moderated.

A Moderator is an Administrative level member of a group, who has the power to review, approve, or reject your postings to the group they are moderating for. The Moderator will probably also have the power to remove you from membership, and bar you from further participation in their group, for any exhibition of overly disruptive behavior.

It is common practice for new members of groups to be under the supervision of the moderators, until you have been a productive, pleasant, member of that group for some period of time. After your continued good behavior, they may decide that they now trust you. At this point the moderator will give their approval for your posts to be routed directly to the group, bypassing their review process.

Not all groups will even have moderators, and there are some groups that do, which will never release you from being moderated. The un-moderated groups can at times become quite unruly, due to the influence of "Trolls", which are disreputable members who seem to delight in baiting people into arguments. Some of these arguments can create very long off topic threads which contribute nothing of value to the group.

Always first find the posting rules pages of any group your are joining, and carefully read those rules, to see what is expected of you before posting to that group. Each group out there will likely have a different set of rules, that outline the preferred methods they expect to be used, to post questions or answers to them.

Some groups will have you add your answers to the top of your replies, others will insist on your adding them to the bottom of your replies, while yet other groups, may prefer you to mix each individual point of your answers, between the quoted sections of the original post, so that each part of your answer, is closest to the most relevant material that each of your points directly addresses.

Please keep in mind when you are composing questions to any group, that you alone are responsible for the effectiveness of your own communications. Also keep in mind, that almost all group's mail's are destined to be archived in search enabled public web pages, where they will typically remain on display for a very long time.

The owners of these web archives of group mails, would greatly appreciate your taking enough time to carefully think about, and select, appropriate relevant subject lines for your messages, which accurately reflect the central point of your questions.

Proper assignment of concise, relevant subject lines on all question posts, are the one best thing, that can help other people searching those archives, to quickly find the answers they need, which may have been already answered, by one of your previous question threads.

Do not forget to include the exact wording of any error messages which occurred, and any numbers they included. Also include any other any error messages or details which may be needed to help diagnose your problem. Details which should be included are any possibly relevant details about your computer, and it's hardware components, including the name and version of your operating system,

The next best things you can do are to please turn on the spell checker in the message client that you use to participate in the user's group's, and strive to develop a good set of writing habits. These good habits include; breaking long posts into smaller logical sentence, and paragraph structures, using proper capitalization, and using proper punctuation.

Some people have a tendency to lazily cram several hundred or more poorly spelled words, into one massive unbroken block of run on text, without using any punctuation marks, or capitalization. These messes of rambling tightly packed together text are very difficult to read, and harder yet to extract any meaning, or details from.

Please do not be one of these people, as you will probably find, that many of the rest of us may not feel like taking the extra effort required to attempt to decipher those awful messes, and may simply skip over them, making no attempt to answer your questions.

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