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Mailinglist Rules

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This is the first file you should be reading before doing any posts on PHP

mailinglists. Following these rules is considered imperative to the success of

the PHP project. Therefore expect your contributions to be of much less positive

impact if you do not follow these rules. More importantly you can actually

assume that not following these rules will hurt the PHP project.

PHP is developed through the efforts of a large number of people.

Collaboration is a Good Thing(tm), and mailinglists lets us do this. Thus,

following some basic rules with regards to mailinglist usage will:

a. Make everybody happier, especially those responsible for developing PHP

itself.

b. Help in making sure we all use our time more efficiently.

c. Prevent you from making a fool of yourself in public.

d. Increase the general level of good will on planet Earth.

Having said that, here are the organizational rules:

1. Respect other people working on the project.

2. Do not post when you are angry. Any post can wait a few hours. Review

your post after a good breather or a good nights sleep.

3. Make sure you pick the right mailinglist for your posting. Please review

the descriptions on the mailinglist overview page

(http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php). When in doubt ask a friend or

someone you trust on IRC.

4. Make sure you know what you are talking about. PHP is a very large project

that strives to be very open. The flip side is that the core developers

are faced with a lot of requests. Make sure that you have done your

research before posting to the entire developer community.

5. Patches have a much greater chance of acceptance than just asking the

PHP developers to implement a feature for you. For one it makes the

discussion more concrete and it shows that the poster put thought and time

into the request.

6. If you are posting to an existing thread, make sure that you know what

previous posters have said. This is even more important the longer the

thread is already.

7. Please configure your email client to use a real name and keep message

signatures to a maximum of 2 lines if at all necessary.

The next few rules are more some general hints:

1. If you notice that your posting ratio is much higher than that of other

people, double check the above rules. Try to wait a bit longer before

sending your replies to give other people more time to digest your answers

and more importantly give you the opportunity to make sure that you

aggregate your current position into a single mail instead of multiple

ones.

2. Consider taking a step back from a very active thread now and then. Maybe

talking to some friends and fellow developers will help in understanding

the other opinions better.

3. Do not top post. Place your answer underneath anyone you wish to quote

and remove any previous comment that is not relevant to your post.

4. Do not high-jack threads, by bringing up entirely new topics. Please

create an entirely new thread copying anything you wish to quote into the

new thread.

Finally, additional hints on how to behave inside the virtual community can be

found in RFC 1855 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html).

Happy hacking,

PHP Team