Listees,
Personally, I'm getting a little annoyed by this, and rather than
flame any thread in general, I would like to post this note
regarding some guidelines that I believe constitute responsible list
posting.
Firstly, please refrain from using obscure subjects. Some
recent ones that I've spotted are "test", "help", "help!!!!",
"newbie question", "why isn't this working". This does not help the
other people reading, because it doesn't tell us what you are having
trouble with, or wanting help with. The more descriptive your
subject is, the better prepared someone will be that answers
your email. For example, if your subject is "test" .. and your
question is regarding regular expressions, then someone that doesn't
know much about regular expression will read your message, and this
is wasting their time.
Along the same lines, if you can prepend your subject with the next
major subject (like [MySQL]), this will further help.
Next thing, please add a reply-to header that has the lists mailing
address. This helps when replying, because the message is sent both
to the list, and the person who initiated the query. A lot of times,
people will reply to a discussion, and the message will not get
posted to the list, thus taking away from the discussion aspect of
it.
If you spot spamming in the list (for example, the Nigerian scams),
please don't add to the noise by responding to the list. Almost
everyone knows obvious spam, and by responding to it you are just
taking away from the PHP questions.
Please don't send your messages priority, with attachments,
HTML-formatted, or with return-reciept requests. Almost all mail
clients mark such messages specifically. For example, prority marked
messages are transferred to some other folder, etc. Some mail
clients delete messages with attachments, or don't format HTML
encoded messages. This doesn't help the people reading, and is
considered poor etiquette.
Regarding posting questions, most people do not mind an off-topic
question occasionally, but please, this is not the support forum for
third party applications.
If you are going to ask a question that is off-topic to the thread,
please post a new message, don't reply and change the the subject
line. This is known as hijacking the thread, and it doesn't help the
original person who posted the question, and is again considered
poor manners.
As a general rule, the more well-researched your question is, the
better responses you will get. For example, if a form post is not
working as expected, adding the relevant code and what you have
tried to troubleshoot it will help. In addition, information about
your particular PHP environment (mainly your PHP version -- both
major and minor version numbers; the version of your web server
software and operating system) go a long way in helping others that
are trying to help you.
I don't mean to anger or offend anyone by this post, I just believe
that if we can follow some common guidelines, the quality of the
list questions and responses will improve. I always find new
techniques to solve problems while reading the list, and trying to
toubleshoot someone else's problem also improves my own PHP skills.
Since this is slightly off topic, I offer a PHP tip :
<tip>
If you are getting "index undefined" errors with autoglobal
arrays (if you use error_reporting(E_ALL)), an easy way to
get rid of those is to verify that an index actually holds
a value. There are a few ways to do this, but I like :
$value = (!empty($_REQUEST['value'])) ? $_REQUEST['value'] : null;
This ensures that a value is only set if the index is valid in
the array.
</tip>
--
Regards,
Burhan Khalid
phplist[at]meidomus[dot]com
http://www.meidomus.com
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