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of certain people, such as DVD (formerly known as CD) wearing a police hat,
... and here i am, living blisfully in the firm, but obviously mistaken,
belief that i am mostly famous for my winning personality ! oh well.
anyway - after two weeks without e-mail (and electricity for that matter -
thanks to wilma - so i had to suffer a horrible absence of miami-ice in my
umbrella drinks) i returned to find 200+ postings in my ccp4 mail folder
(unsurprisingly, i am still using pine). eager to learn a lot of new things
about crystallography (and related areas such as ligation), i spent three
hours reading them all. however, even if one considers postings about
keyboards, missing passwords, german interpunction rules, "problem solved -
thanks" (without a description of how the problem was actually solved) etc. to
be on-topic, still about half of all postings were META-postings, i.e.
postings about postings (out-of-office replies, e-mail versus web, scope of
topics, splitting the bb, appropriate subjects, etc.) ... perhaps we should
consider creating a separate mailing list for meta-postings (alternatively
include the word "meta-posting" in the subject line) ?
some free-of-charge opinions (not even 2 cents worth, in other words):
- out-of-office - many can be filtered out automatically, other receive a
sarcastic reply. annoying but hardly worth pulling your hairs out over
- e-mail versus web - do as you please, but keep in mind that if the e-mail
option disappears many of the subscribers that will cop out are probably those
who provide the bulk of the answers to questions. not everybody wants to be a
bleeding-edge techno-snob
- scope - live and let live. ccp4bb has grown to become the single most useful
and broadest bb in px, so as long as postings have to do with our everyday
work (including ligation and keyboard woes), why not ? use filters, delete key
etc.
- appropriate subject lines - very important in view of the previous issue
- replying to the entire bb or not ? some of the most interesting discussions
on ccp4bb involve those where someone posts a reply to the entire bb and gets
a dozen replies, replies to replies, etc. moreover, replying only to the
person who asked the questions means that much useful information will be lost
since few people actually post a summary. hence, if a reply adds something
relevant (or opinionated, or even both) to a discussion i would suggest to
send it to the entire bb
--dvd
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Gerard J. Kleywegt
[Research Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences]
Dept. of Cell & Molecular Biology University of Uppsala
Biomedical Centre Box 596
SE-751 24 Uppsala SWEDEN
http://xray.bmc.uu.se/gerard/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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The opinions in this message are fictional. Any similarity
to actual opinions, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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