post mortem

["harp-l listowner" <owner-harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Reading through the German Harmonicas why? thread I can see a couple of
things that if they were just a smidge different would have changed the
outcome and resuled in a lot less hurt all the way around.

Posting of a private post to the list.  Please be extremely careful in a
repost.  If someone sends you something offlist it needs to stay offlist
unless you have explicit permission from the original author.  A great
case in point for how to do this is the repost from Ron Holmes, he
explicitly grants permission to the person he's writing to repost his
offlist reply to harp-l.  Nothing accelerates and arguement more quickly
than seeing something you thought you sent in confidence show up in a
public forum.  Please do watch this, we've had a lot of problems in this
area lately.

Something a lot of people do to try and mitigate the offlist post problem
is label an offlist post offlist in the subject header.  That's not meant
to excuse people's not reading the from line of their e-mails.  It is the
responsibility of the person posting to the list to make sure that their
content they are providing was intended for public consumption.  When in
doubt don't post it.

Misattribution of quoted text.  This gets prety darn hard once a thread
gets going.  We just had a classic case of this yesterday.  Please do
quote text with care, hand inserting the attribution if that is
appropriate.  The goal of harp-l and any other internet forum is
communication in a specific targeted subject area.  Communication is
hampered when nobody knows who said what.  Sometimes detective work will
be your only way to actually track down the correct originator of a piece
of text you'd like to comment on.  Please do take the time to insure
you've correctly identifed the quoted text.  For the readers of the quoted
text please do take the time to insure you've reacted to what you think
you're reacting to.  It's all there in your mail queue.

Attaboy posts.  This is where you append a one line agreement or
disagreement to a large included text thread that you've quoted.  It's a
waste of bandwidth and really doesn't further the discussion.  Please use
the cutting and pasting capabilities of your e-mail programs to tightly
edit your reply when what you're wanting to do is append a one line
comment.  In general I would discourage this type of posting but there are
times when it can be appropriate.

Finally I don't mean to single out any particular person or incident in
this post.  It just seemed like it might be time for a review.  We're
constantly adding membership and because of that maintenance of the list
culture is ongoing.  Please do read the Welcome info,
http://www.harp-l.com/harpl.htm
Virtually all of the issues I've addressed above are much more cleverly
addressed in that document.  Thanks for your time and attention in these
matters.