Email Rules of Decorum
Participants who break these rules willfully and repeatedly will: 1st time: Be given a warning and reminded of these rules, 2nd time: Be suspended from the list for a period of time to be recommended by the list administrator and approved by the committee leadership (co-cos / liaisons / activators). Subscribers have the right to appeal their suspension to the state Coordinating Committee:
- No anonymity. All subscribers must truthfully identify themselves at the time of subscription, and in the body of each message. At subscription time, you must give information sufficient to contact you in the event you lose email access.
- Address the group. Messages must be addressed to the entire group of subscribers. Side conversations must be taken to 1-to-1 email.
- No "personality" discussion. Speculation or accusation about another person's motives, thought processes, or beliefs is prohibited. You may explain why you did something, but proposing theories about what other people were thinking when they did things is off-charter.
- No insulting, disparaging, degrading, or demeaning language. It is never necessary to label other people in order to discuss their ideas and activities. It is never necessary to compare people to historical war criminals or other reviled figures. Chronic, hurtful sarcasm, or giving people vengeful nicknames, or any other disrespectful treatment of your fellow activists, is grounds for loss of subscription.
- No flooding, repetition or crossposting. No double posting to other lists. A message posted to this list must have no other recipients (except the poster) in its To:, Cc:, or Bcc: lines.
- No off-charter material. There are thousands of Internet mailing lists about issues of interest to Greens. Nobody can read them all, and each of us must be free to set our own priorities. You can repost a message from elsewhere, but you must introduce it by explaining where it came from and what it's got to do with the Green movement, even if you think the relevance is obvious.
- Format of messages (25K maximum). The language of Internet email is plain text. Two alphabets are acceptable in these lists: the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and the International Standards Organization's ISO8859-1, also known as Latin 1. (Latin 1 encoding must be correctly specified in your message header, using the Multipurpose Internet Message Extensions. Don't worry, most email software does this automatically.) No graphics, word processor documents, X-faces, V-Cards, Microsoft Rich Text Format, or other non-text encodings are allowed. Two exceptions are made: customary cryptographic signatures or fingerprints are allowed, and simple structural markup (emphasis, lists, etc.) may be encoded in HTML 2.0. Keep the message size limited to 25K.
- Accurate, substantial subject lines. People must be able to decide whether to read your message, before they read it. Therefore, your "Subject:" line must truthfully identify the topic of your message. It is seldom appropriate to name another person in a Subject line. In particular, messages with Subjects such as "Joe Green" or "Joe Green's post" are not allowed. Messages with no Subject line will be rejected.
- No cracking or forging. Messages to the lists must be addressed to the announced posting address. No attempts to defeat the operation of the server software by guessing internal addresses are allowed. Messages to the lists must contain a From: address which is substantially the same as the address where the poster subscribes. False From: lines will be treated as an attempt to breach the physical security of the list server, and may violate your local "computer misuse" or "chattel trespass" laws.
- Limit the size of your message. When posting a reply to a specific discussion thread, it is not necessary to include the entire history of the discussion in your reply. By quoting the message that you're replying to, you inflate the size of the message that you're posting and bog down the e-mail server.