Dear all,

I found the netiquette post from dr. Mughal above quite good, the email charter that Juergen posted earlier is a bit over the top for me. Do I really have to live in a world where people thank me for sparing me 30 seconds of their time ?

It seems to me that on the whole the discussion here on the forum is quite civilized, probably partly because many of us are used to the somewhat soothing language of scientific publications . Having said that, I think most of us have some subjects we feel very strongly about and from time to time we may be carried away a bit in our responses, which is fine to a point. My personal experience (on this forum) is that if you write in a more activist style without providing some logical structure your ideas are just not taken completely seriously, which kind of defeats the purpose. This seems to be fairly well self regulating. I think closing a post as a moderator would really be a very heavy weapon. Maybe an occasional -good humored- reminder to not let discussions turn into a bar-fight could be appropriate.

all the best in 2014

Marijn


++++++++++++++

Note by moderator (EvM): This thread is now closed. You can continue the discussion in this related thread: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/135-qu...e-will-enjoy-reading

Dear Colleagues,

I am very fine with

fish and closing the case

with Keith and Julius heated exchanges.

Whats differs us from fishes? Emotions and different cultural backgrounds.
Some times we get carried away during heated exchanges of arguments and forgetting about different cultural backgrounds. That is human nature...

Just false consensuses on very different technical science, social or political points will not bring anything out. The rest is just very subjective personal taste and YES

Make a clear point and than go on to other themes

ALL the Best to ALL
Detlef

I do agree. We might differ in opinion but should maintain it at a professional - level. I admit that I was close to ask Elisabeth if we shouldnot close the thread but than I thought - Make a clear point and than go on to other themes - as we are doing now. We have to live in an open space with somewhat extreme ideas as well. But I find it dificult to bear. The problem is... where stops the strictly professional? That´s very subjective.

Yours
Christoph

Dear Elisabeth and rest of the Sectt. staff,

I was sad to see discussion on one topic on this forum, where I felt that the decency of language got somewhat derailed. It talked of fish and closing the case.

Please remind the participants that they should discuss purely on the technical aspects only. If someone write something which is not accurate in the eyes of others, it is our duty to respond politely and in a decent language.

Dr. Kerstin Danert circulated netiquette, before start of email discussion for the Catarina's handbook on human right to W&S. I'm attaching it here.

I suggest that the secretariat should develop a reminder for the participants for maintaing politeness and decency in the language.

I'm sorry for putting up this. One particular thread made me sad.

Regards,

F H Mughal

Hi Detlef,

AquaVerde wrote: Anyway if difficult sanitation details or ideas are only boring, because of text lengths, then bad luck & so be it...

In my e-mail Outlook client, there is a folder dedicated to your e-mails. I still have all these mails you've sent me since we first communicated via EcoSanRes. I've read them. They are long.

Chris Anderson, curator of TED, came up with the email charter: emailcharter.org/
I think I've mentioned this before.

I used to write longer emails in the past. Often people wouldn't respond. I then discovered Twitter in 2007. Twitter helped me in keeping things short. I then kept my mails shorter. People started replying more often because I started respecting their time.

I know it may sound arrogant and I am not in a position to tell you on how to communicate. However, longer text is often ignored because the attention span is limited. How many of the readers here have a zero inbox? How many are able to share their knowledge with the community during office hours?

So if time is a limiting factor, reading is optimized and eyeballs are scanning for content that is easy to digest or with scientific news. Activists like you and me who knock on doors need to find smarter approaches. It is against this background that I understand your use of CAPITAL LETTERS. => www.google.com/search?q=capital+letters+shouting

AquaVerde wrote: How could forum-users "copy and past" from word-docs direct in the message box without loosing the word-formats?

I am afraid this isn't possible. You may want to search for an offline "BBEditor" though which is what the forum uses (BBCode => en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode).

@Elisabeth: we could also include Google+, btw. I am also fine if Twitter and Facebook aren't part of the forum.


bests,
jke

To complete the list of suggestion for making post easy to read: additionally to use headers and pictures there is also the possibility of sharing background documents in the attachments.
This may help to focus on key findings/questions in the post and providing further information by indicating where to find them in the attached document.
Attachments can though only be accessed by people who have logged in (?), but if these are relevant documents for a larger public, they could be integrated into the SuSanA library and then inserted through a link.
Dorothee

Well for me personally I partly agree with Juergen, but in practise we don't often have posts on this forum that are "too long". They are only "too long" if they are waffly but that is rarely the case, I find. Quite the contrary. There are some people who really put effort and thinking into their posts and many people benefit from their experiences (e.g. Christoph P., Doreen, Sjoerd, Florian, Marijn, Julius, Jonathan, Chris C., Emmanuel - thank you all!).
A long post is also easy to read if the author uses bold, colours or subheading to structure the text. Or includes photos or graphs (I often try to include photos in mine).

I actually find the opposite almost worse: Very short Mini-posts which just say "Thank you" or "Yes, I agree". Please don't make those posts but rather simply click on the "Thank you"-button that is under each post (you have to be logged in to see it). It is otherwise a hassle to see these mini-posts e.g. in the e-mail alert.

People who prefer short communications can use LinkedIn or Twitter... Actually we discussed yesterday with our IT developer that we could maybe link the forum better to Twitter and Facebook by including a Twitter- and Facebook Share Button under each post. He is checking if that is possible. Then we end up with the best of both worlds. This would mean we have in-depth conversations here on this forum, coupled with the option of easy and fast sharing on social media channels.

Regarding the capital letters, I agree with Jürgen. Maybe what he meant was not to write a whole sentence in capital letters, but an occassional word is fine (althouh making it bold or underlined is more elegant). If a whole sentence is written in capital letters is "sounds" like someone is shouting or angry. But we hardly ever have this on this forum anyway.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Dear Jürgen,

Thanks for your constructive text critics.
If for campaigning web-forums (political) I am agreeing with you, in very specific forums with some times difficult science details, I am not agreeing. Anyway if difficult sanitation details or ideas are only boring, because of text lengths, then bad luck & so be it...

Take it easy
Detlef (Troll

Jürgen: How could forum-users "copy and past" from word-docs direct in the message box without loosing the word-formats?

sorry Jürgen I´m a fan of trolls and of capital letter use at for me it is a way to express what I think is important without doing anything else

Thanks for the hint about long posts, never thought about that.
CP

(note by moderator EvM: I have cut this into a new thread as it has evolved to be a separate topic, independent of Detlef's introduction)

Thx for the official introduction, Detlef, and great to have you on board the SuSanA forum. I am sure you'll find what you are looking for in terms of honest exchange on practical experiences.

If there is one thing though which I would like to request from you (and also others) then it probably is to use less CAPITAL LETTERS and please keep your posts short. Not because they aren't interesting or not important (you are a great resource and truly an expert!), but because longer forum posts are often ignored. In internet slang, we also call this "tl;dr" (="too long, didn't read"). And from the direct exchange with you over the years, I learned that most problems SuSan is currently facing in Europe are related to political and social reasons.

(I don't want to offend anyone, but CAPITAL LETTERS used to EMPHASIZE something often are a bit irritating. In my books, only trolls and angry citizens use it...)