From owner-freebsd-newbies Sun Sep 5 21: 1: 0 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from phoenix.welearn.com.au (phoenix.welearn.com.au [139.130.44.81]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CADDD1547B for ; Sun, 5 Sep 1999 21:00:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sue@phoenix.welearn.com.au) Received: (from sue@localhost) by phoenix.welearn.com.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA50826 for freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org; Mon, 6 Sep 1999 14:00:06 +1000 (EST) (envelope-from sue) Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 14:00:04 +1000 From: Sue Blake To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: How to do it right Message-ID: <19990906140001.G23466@welearn.com.au> Mail-Followup-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org If you see someone asking for FreeBSD support here and you want to answer, please go right ahead, but you know that it has to go to freebsd-questions instead. When you change the headers to send to the correct list, please remove freebsd-newbies (but still cc: to the person who was asking, of course). Cross-posting is generally not allowed on FreeBSD lists, and freebsd-newbies is for learning things like "don't cross-post", hence the reminder. For people who have recently arrived from the Linux world, it might be confusing at first. While the linux-newbies list is open slather for easy questions and answers, the freebsd-newbies list is not for support questions at all. This difference might seem strange, but it is important, so I'll throw in my viewpoint. Traditionally Linux users were more concerned with helping friends on crash boxes at home, while FreeBSD users were more concerned with making production servers run reliably. To a large extent that is still the case. A trainee working at Yahoo! or cdrom.com would be a FreeBSD newbie, for example, but couldn't afford to risk learning from other newbies' guesses. Someone learning Linux at home or school might learn a lot by screwing the system a few times, but we don't condone that sort of thing here because so many of our newbies are people with serious work to do. They just happen to be new to FreeBSD. All freebsd help questions and answers, even the smallest, go to freebsd-questions@freebsd.org. (That information is in the Handbook, was sent to you personally when you subscribed, is reposted here weekly, and is currently being reformatted as a series of video clips with exotic dancers). If people keep answering general support questions here we might as well combine the two lists, ie kill free-newbies, because there won't be any difference. It is FreeBSD.org mailing list policy to avoid overlap between lists. Freebsd-questions will give you the best and most reliable support you could ask for. Within the FreeBSD community, quality of help is important. We don't want to risk anyone being given only the wrong information, so the best people watch over freebsd-questions and no potentially inferior list is allowed to duplicate that effort. But if you'd still rather have your questions answered by other newbies (and take the consequences), you can have that too. That service is not provided from within the FreeBSD Project but there is an external list where newbies can tell each other what they think they know, and help each other learn more. If that suits you, go take a look. Send a blank message to freebsd-tips-subscribe@egroups.com to subscribe to that list, where "no tip is too small". It's a totally separate list, not part of FreeBSD.org, but started by some newbies who were able to use this list to plan another activity. Again, one of the major roles of the freebsd-newbies list is to give you a casual chatty newbies-only kinda place to learn how to use the other FreeBSD lists and resources properly while getting to know each other. If after a year's trial that learning still isn't happening, we've failed. If newbies' participation here _causes_ people to flaunt the overall list rules (see handbook), then the newbies list certainly cannot be justified. Of course, occasional errors are inevitable, and errors are explicitly allowed on this list, as long as learning follows. Since most of the ones repeatedly making mistakes are those who do know better, there is no good reason why this should be getting out of hand now. You can ask where to find documentation, which list to post to, how to (un)subscribe, what is the best way to start learning something, or engage in any kind of general social chat, but please don't ask installation or support questions here. You know where to go. And even more importantly, don't answer them here. -- Regards, -*Sue*- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message