Acceptable Use Policy

It is the intention that POINTS remains fairly informal. However some guidelines are needed for the consideration of all members of the community. This is sometimes referred to as "Netiquette".

1. General Guidelines
1. Respect should be shown at all times. Remember, misunderstandings can occur fairly easily in a community like this for various reasons such as tone being difficult to judge, or posts not being read in their entirety. It is recommended that if you find yourself cursing at someone, it's a good idea to cool down before writing a reply.
   It's also worth noting that we are trying to bring people from different backgrounds together here. What may seem obvious to technically minded people may not be obvious to others and vice versa.
2. If you have an auto responder on your email address (i.e. something on your email that responds to everyone who sends a mail saying something along the lines of you'll be back on Monday), remember that the message will be sent to EVERYONE on the list. Please be considerate of this.
2. Subject Guidelines
1. Subjects should be descriptive to the purpose of the post. If a thread (string of messages relating to the same subject) should evolve into another subject, then the subject should be changed to indicate this.
2. Subjects should be related to the purpose of this community. That is, teaching approaches, the Information Technology behind this or the open source philosophy.
3. Posting Guidelines
1. Posts to the list are only accepted from subscribed addresses.
   • There are options. If you need to send messages from another address, subscribe with that address using the "no delivery" option.
2. Please post in plain text ONLY! Use of html or rich text content is strongly discouraged. This is because the size of the message becomes a lot bigger when the message can be just as effectively conveyed in plain text. Remember, there may be hundreds of messages going out. No one wants to have to wait longer times for their email than is necessary.
3. When replying, please only quote the relevant parts of the message and delete the rest. This avoids the situation where the quote is longer than the reply.
4. Please do quote. There are likely to be a lot of messages flying about and it makes it more readable if we know what it is that you're replying to.
5. Top posting is discouraged. Top posting is when you reply to a message at the top of a message. It is generally considered good form to reply at the bottom of a message. And since you're going to have to make sure you're not over quoting, scrolling to the end of the message is good practise.
6. No thread hijacking!
   If you need to start a new thread, please do it as a new email. Don't reply to a previous email and change the subject. This causes problems with email clients that track threads.
   In addition, please don't ask about something completely new on the bottom of an existing thread.
7. Please avoid hideous amounts of white space. A single line normally does to separate information. It can be annoying to have to scroll down several pages to see a small post.