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- <h1>Boost Discussion Policy</h1>
- <p>Email discussion is the tie that binds boost members together into a community.
- If the discussion is stimulating and effective, the community thrives. If
- the discussion degenerates into name calling and ill will, the community withers
- and dies.</p>
- <h2>Contents</h2>
- <dl>
- <dt><a href="#acceptable">Acceptable Topics</a><dd>
- <dt><a href="#unacceptable">Unacceptable Topics</a><dd>
- <dt><a href="#quoting">Effective Posting</a><dd>
- <dt><a href="#behavior">Prohibited Behavior</a><dd>
- <dt><a href="#culture">Culture</a><dd>
- </dl>
- <h2><a name="acceptable"></a>Acceptable topics</h2>
- <ul>
- <li>Queries to determine interest in a possible library submission.</li>
- <li>Technical discussions about a proposed or existing library, including bug
- reports and requests for help.</li>
- <li>Formal Reviews of proposed libraries.</li>
- <li>Reports of user experiences with Boost libraries.</li>
- <li>Boost administration or policies.</li>
- <li>Compiler specific workarounds as applied to Boost libraries.</li>
- </ul>
- <p>Other topics related to boost development may be acceptable, at the discretion of moderators. If unsure, go ahead and post. The moderators
- will let you know.</p>
- <h2><a name="unacceptable"></a>Unacceptable topics</h2>
- <ul>
- <li>Advertisements for commercial products.</li>
- <li>Requests for help getting non-boost code to compile with your compiler.
- Try the comp.lang.c++.moderated newsgroup instead.</li>
- <li>Requests for help interpreting the C++ standard. Try the comp.std.c++
- newsgroup instead.</li>
- <li>Job offers.</li>
- <li>Requests for solutions to homework assignments.</ul>
- <h2><a name="quoting"></a>Effective Posting</h2>
- <p>Please <b>prune extraneous quoted text</b> from replies so that
- only the relevant parts are included. Some people have to pay for, or
- wait for, each byte that they download from the list. More
- importantly, it will save time and make your post more valuable when
- readers do not have to find out which exact part of a previous message
- you are responding to.
- <p>A common and very useful approach is to cite the small fractions of
- the message you are actually responding to and to put your response
- directly beneath each citation, with a blank line separating them for
- readability:
- <blockquote>
- <pre>
- > Some part of a paragraph that you wish to reply to goes
- > here; there may be several lines.
- Your response to that part of the message goes here. There may,
- of course, be several lines.
- > The second part of the paragraph that is relevant to your
- > reply goes here; agiain there may be several lines.
- Your response to the second part of the message goes here.
- ...
- </pre>
- </blockquote>
- For more information about effective use of quotation in posts, see <a
- href="http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html">this helpful
- guide</a>.
- <p>A summary of the foregoing thread is only needed after a long
- discussion, especially when the topic is drifting or a result has been
- achieved in a discussion. The mail system will do the tracking that
- is needed to enable mail readers to display message threads (and every
- decent mail reader supports that).
- <p>If you ever have to refer to single message earlier in a thread or
- in a different thread then you can use a URL to the <a
- href="mailing_lists.htm#archive">message archives</a>. To help to
- keep those URLs short, you can use <a
- href="http://www.tinyurl.com">tinyurl.com</a>. Citing the relevant
- portion of a message you link to is often helpful (if the citation is
- small).
- <p>Don't forget, you're a single writer but there are many readers,
- and you want them to stay interested in what you're saying. Saving
- your readers a little time and effort is usually worth the extra time
- you spend when writing a message. Also, boost discussions are saved
- for posterity, as rationales and history of the work we do. A post's
- usefulness in the future is determined by its readability.
- <p>The mailing list software automatically limits message and
- attachment size to a reasonable amount, typically 75K, which is
- adjusted from time-to-time by the moderators.. This limit is a
- courtesy to those who rely on dial-up Internet access.
- </p>
- <p><b>When starting a new topic, always send a fresh message</b>,
- rather than beginning a reply to some other message and replacing the
- subject and body. Many mailers are able to detect the thread you
- started with and will show the new message as part of the original
- thread, which probably isn't what you intended. Follow this guideline
- for your own sake as well as for others'. Often, people scanning for
- relevant messages will decide they're done with a topic and hide or
- kill the entire thread: your message will be missed, and you won't get
- the response you're looking for.
- <p><b>Do not reply to digests</b> if you are a digest delivery
- subscriber. Your reply will not be properly threaded and will
- probably have the wrong subject line. Instead, you can reply through
- the <a href="http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel">GMane
- web interface</a>.
- <h2><a name="behavior"></a>Prohibited behavior</h2>
- <p>Prohibited behavior will not be tolerated. The moderators will ban
- postings by abusers.</p>
- <h3>Flame wars</h3>
- <p>Personal insults, argument for the sake of argument, and all the other
- behaviors which fall into the "flame war" category are
- prohibited. Discussions should focus on technical arguments, not the
- personality traits or motives of participants.</p>
- <h3>Third-party attacks</h3>
- <p>Attacks on third parties such as software vendors, hardware vendors, or any
- other organizations, are prohibited. Boost exists to unite and serve the
- entire C++ community, not to disparage the work of others.</p>
- <p>Does this mean that we ban the occasional complaint or wry remark about a
- troublesome compiler? No, but be wary of overdoing it.</p>
- <h3>Off-topic posts</h3>
- <p>Discussions which stray from the acceptable topics are strongly discouraged.
- While off-topic posts are often well meaning and not as individually corrosive
- as other abuses, cumulatively the distraction damages the effectiveness of
- discussion.</p>
- <h2><a name="culture"></a>Culture</h2>
- <p>In addition to technical skills, Boost members value collaboration,
- acknowledgement of the help of others, and a certain level of politeness. Boost
- membership is very international, and ranges widely in age and other
- characteristics. Think of discussion as occurring among colleagues in a widely read forum, rather
- than among a few close friends.</p>
- <p>Always remember that the cumulative effort spent by people reading
- your contribution scales with the (already large) number of boost
- members. Thus, do invest time and effort to make your message as
- readable as possible. Adhere to English syntax and grammar rules such
- as proper capitalization. Avoid copious informalism, colloquial
- language, or abbreviations, they may not be understood by all readers.
- Re-read your message before submitting it.</p>
- <h2>Guidelines for effective discussions</h2>
- <p>Apply social engineering to prevent heated technical discussion from
- degenerating into a shouting match, and to actively encourage the cooperation
- upon which Boost depends.</p>
- <ul>
- <li>Questions help. If someone suggests something that you don't think
- will work, then replying with a question like "will that compile?"
- or "won't that fail to compile, or am I missing something?" is a
- lot smoother than "That's really stupid - it won't compile."
- Saying "that fails to compile for me, and seems to violate section
- n.n.n of the standard" would be yet another way to be firm without
- being abrasive.</li>
- <li>If most of the discussion has been code-free generalities, posting a bit
- of sample code can focus people on the practical issues.</li>
- <li>If most of the discussion has been in terms of specific code, try to talk
- a bit about hidden assumptions and generalities that may be preventing
- discussion closure.</li>
- <li>Taking a time-out is often effective. Just say: "Let me think
- about that for a day or two. Let's take a time-out to digest the
- discussion so far."</li>
- </ul>
- <p>Avoid Parkinson's Bicycle Shed. Parkinson described a committee formed
- to oversee design of an early nuclear power plant. There were three agenda
- items - when to have tea, where to put the bicycle shed, and how to
- ensure nuclear safety. Tea was disposed of quickly as trivial.
- Nuclear safety was discussed for only
- an hour - it was so complex, scary, and technical that even
- among experts few felt comfortable with the issues. Endless days were then
- spent discussing where to put the bicycle shed (the parking lot would
- be a modern equivalent) because everyone
- understood the issues and felt comfortable discussing them. </p>
- <hr>
- <p>Revised <!--webbot bot="Timestamp" S-Type="EDITED" S-Format="%d %B, %Y" startspan -->02 October, 2003<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" i-checksum="38549" endspan -->
- </p>
- <p>© Beman Dawes 2000</p>
- <p> Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
- (See accompanying file <a href="../LICENSE_1_0.txt">LICENSE_1_0.txt</a> or
- copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt">www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
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