Guidelines and Etiquitte

• Be helpful and friendly: We're here to answer questions. Insulting someone or making them feel stupid for asking questions harms the group overall and makes you look like a jerk in public.
• Ask smart questions: before you ask for help, make sure you have tried to solve the problem on your own, and provide details about what you did and the results you got. Read this [1] for more details.
• Post the solution: Did somebody on the list answer your question? thank them and put the question by responding with "Thanks a lot smartypants, that solved it!" Or if you figured it out on your own, save someone else the trouble by posting the solution.
• Trim your posts: A list message is sent out hundreds or thousands of times. Lengthy, untrimmed posts slow down the list server and add unnecessary bandwidth and storage requirements without adding value. More importantly, untrimmed posts make the digest version of the list almost completely unreadable. Please keep only the portions of the message you are responding to in your post, and trim away signatures, list trailers and all the unnecessary cruft. Read this [2] for more information.
• Stay on topic: This list has a very specific focus and you shouldn't assume that subscribers share your interests beyond that focus. If you really feel the need to go offtopic, clearly identify the thread by putting "OT" in the subject line. Consider "paying" for your post by including a useful tip or resource that is relevent to the focus of the list.
• Consider your give-and-take ratio: Mailing lists are successful when people are both asking and answering questions. If you find yourself benefitting regularly from getting your questions answered, consider what you can do to give back by helping someone else out or posting an interesting tool or idea. No contribution is too small!
• Keep your vendettas offlist: Avoid insulting your clients, coworkers or other members on this public resource. It is unprofessional and the public archives can really come back to get you.

Privacy and Spam

The act of subscribing to this list does not increase your chance of getting spam. List addresses are never shared, transmitted or used for any purpose other than directing list posts your way. When you send a post, we make every effort to ensure that web archives do not include email addresses in crawlable form, so the risk of having your email address automatically harvested is minimized.

However, once you send a message to the list the risk of spam increases because we can't be accountable for the actions of our subscribers. When list posts sent by you arrive in someone's inbox your address may become the target of spam or virus attacks originating from their computer. Also, well-intentioned subscribers may be storing or publicly archiving messages without following proper guidelines for obfuscating your addresses.

If are concerned about this, you can use a separate email address for just list postings, and periodically change it when spam becomes an issue. Please consult the documentation provided by your email client to set the correct sender address to avoid problems with posting to the list.

Problems posting to the list

The single most common problem people have with posting to the list is an inconsistency between the address subscribed to the list and the address your email client is sending messages from.

This usually happens when you subscribe with an address that forwards to your real address. You can be receiving messages normally this way, but when you attempt to post the address used in the "from" field is not subscribed and you'll get an error message from the list server.

The error message contains the address you tried to send the message from, and the "to" header in the messages you receive show the address you have subscribed. The key is to make these the same by doing one of the following:

1. Set the sender for your posts to match the address you're receiving from. You may need to consult your email client's documentation to learn how to do this.
2. Subscribe with the address you will be using to send messages. You can do this by emailing listname-subscribe@listhost.com. If you wish to unsubscribe the other address, you can include it in an email address, like this: talk-unsubscribe-mbox=example.com@tcphp.org where mbox@example.com is the address you wish to unsubscribe and talk@tcphp.org is the mailing list.
3. Contact the list owner to have us add you to the allowed list. This should be a last resort and we will only do this after you have demonstrated why the other solutions don't work.