Note: What this document is not about.

Caferati uses Google Groups to run all our email newsgroups. This page does touch upon some Google Groups settings and functions, but this is not a Google Groups primer. Google Groups has an excellent Help section which you will find linked to at the top right corner of every Googlegroups page. Please use that Help section for answers to all your basic questions on how to use Google Groups if you are new to the service.

Right. On with the show.

1. This newsgroup’s main purpose.

Caferati’s city chapter newsgroups are meant primarily to help members in those cities to plan and coordinate Caferati read-meets.
I.e., to suggest or offer venues, to suggest, argue about and finalise dates and times, to suggest and finalise themes, to suggest moderators or to offer to moderate.

2. This newsgroup’s other uses.

Members are also welcome to post information about non-Caferati events and opportunities in that city, provided that are relevant to writers.
These include book launches, writing contests, writing awards shows, panel discussions and debates related to writing, workshops and courses for writers, the availability of your book in local bookshops and the like.
For writing opportunities that are not limited to your city, members are requested to post them on the forum, or to submit them to Caferati Listings. (Please see http://groups.google.com/group/Caferati-Listings/web/FAQs.)

3. Spamming the group. Or what is not welcome here.

What do we consider spam?

• Your poems and fiction and essays and other original writing.
  Yes, we know, that’s confusing; this is a writers’ group and all that. But please re-read points 1 and 2 above.
  This newsgroup is not the place to workshop your writing. Please post your original writing only in the forum at Ryze where you have access to a much larger group of writers, one that is not limited to accidents of geography.
  Or bring your work to the read-meets, where you have the advantage of face-to-face interaction with people you get to know personally, from one meet to the next.
  One exception: new members, when you’re introducing yourself to the group, you can choose to send us a link to your writing, if you have one.
• Email forwards.
  Please don’t send them to the group.
  No, not even cheery and inspiring thoughts for the day, witty quotations, absorbing articles and side-splitting cartoons.
  NO!
  Save those for the people that are in your personal address book. Thank you.
  Even if you know every member of this group, this is not your personal mailing list; when you treat it like one you are deliberately abusing it. And if you are doing this even though you do not know every single one of its members intimately, you are being very rude and inconsiderate.
  (While we’re on the topic, to preserve privacy and prevent misuse, regular members do not have access to the list of email addresses of all members of the group. Caferati’s moderators and the city group managers do have access, and we promise not to sell, loan or give away your contact information to any other organisation or individual.)
• Invitations to join you on some social networking site
  Many of these sites give you an easy way to add your friends: you let the site into your email address book. You should only do this after checking what the site does with the information you let it access.
  If it’s a responsible site, you then get to choose the friends you invite, and the site mails them for you. When you’re choosing, please make sure you’re not inviting this entire group to join you. It’s pretty stupid, because the invitation can only be used once, and besides, it’s bad manners, as we said in the bit about email forwards, above.
  If the site is one of those sites that does not give you the option, it mass-mails everyone in your address book. For your own good, you should be avoiding such sites. They make you look clueless.
• Petitions, even if they are for very worthy causes.
  Send those directly to people you know, please. We understand that they mean a lot to you, and we feel for you, really we do. But that is not what the other members of the group have signed on for.
• Discussions or debates.
  This is not a restriction of your right to freedom of speech. It is an insistence that you respect the purposes of the group, and an assumption that you have read and understood those purposes when you signed up.
  There are many groups, online and off, and blogs and forums too, set up specifically for online debate. debate. Try those.
  The only debates members of this newsgroup have signed up for are about making specific pieces of writing better. And those debates are to be held in the forum, not in the mailing lists.
• Personal replies.
  Please do not post replies to the entire newsgroup when they are really meant for just one person, the sender of the mail.
  This requires a little extra effort from you, because when you hit the the reply button to an email from the newsgroup, by default, your mail will be addressed to the entire newsgroup.
  Please take an extra three seconds to copy and paste the sender’s e-ddress into the “To” field of your email.
  Or visit the group’s web page, where you will see the option to “Reply to author” under each message, right next to “Reply” and “Forward.”

4. What do you do when other members break the rules?

Please correct or gently scold the members who spam the group or otherwise ignore its guidelines. No matter how well-intentioned they are, they are wasting your time and bandwidth, and that of every other subscriber to the list.

They are, effectively, spamming the group.

But please do this with a polite private email directly to the erring member, not with a public message to the entire group. Such public posturing only adds to the clutter, so is self-defeating. It would also help if you informed the group’s managers, to let them know you have done the Responsible Cybercitizen thing so that they don’t duplicate your efforts.

If you think the city chapter coordinators who administer these lists may have missed such spam, please alert them directly (see the bottom of this page for instructions on how to do that). Do not add to the clutter—and risk provoking needless arguments—by posting to the entire group complaining about it.

5. For members subscribed via the “Email” option.

That’s the one which sends you every mail sent to the group.

You are accustomed to Gmail helpfully not showing the quoted bits of text or the full mail chain when they read replies. Unfortunately, Googlegroups does not hide the quoted text when it posting the Daily Digests. So subscribers are forced to scroll through interminable lines of text all starting with “>” and “>>” and “>>>>>>>” and so on, making it very difficult to read and difficult to tell when the next message in the digest starts.

To avoid this, please keep only the relevant portions of the mail you’re replying to, and delete all the rest. And thread your replies next to the questions themselves.

Eg:

Mail 1, from Person A:
When should we have the next read-meet?
What time?

Mail 2, your reply:
> When should we have the next read-meet?
How about this Sunday
> What time?
6 p.m. should be good for everyone

Mail 3, a reply from Person B:
>> When should we have the next read-meet?
>How about this Sunday
>> What time?
>6 p.m. should be good for everyone
Can we do this earlier, please? Monday is a working day, remember, so I’d like to get home early and sleep.

Mail 4, your reply:
> Can we do this earlier, please?
Sure. Is 4p.m. good for everyone?

6. Subject Lines.

Don’t change the Subject line when you’re replying to a topic. No, not even if you have something really witty to say. It means your reply gets pushed into a new thread, and readers have no clue what you’re referring to or have to go back and forth in different threads to figure it out.

Do change the subject line when you’re starting a new topic. It is lazy and inconsiderate to start a new, irrelevant topic that hijacks an existing thread. It irritates other folks who are staying on topic, and wastes their time.

7. Staying on topic.

Please respect the instructions of the thread’s originator. If someone asks for, say, suggestions on venues for a read-meet, and asks members to add to a list and add votes to the ones people are in favour of, do ONLY that. All else is spam.

8. For those of you who subscribe via the “Digest email” or “Abridged email” options.

Digests give the full text of the last 25 emails or the last day’s worth of emails, all in one mail; Abridged email is a once-a-day email that gives you a summary, with extracts, of the previous day’s emails.

Pretty puhleeeeze, with bells on top and chocolate chip cookies on the side, don’t hit “Reply“ to the Digest or Abridged mailings.

You wind up with a subject line like “Re: 2 new messages in 2 topics - digest” which makes for much mess, not to speak of bafflement, for the reader trying to figure out which message in that digest you’re replying to.

Instead:
- Click on the link below the Topic title in the mail body.

Eg:
============================================================================== TOPIC: Next readmeet
http://groups.google.com/group/Caferati-Cityname/browse _thread/thread/randomjumbleofletters
==============================================================================
Clicking the link would take you to the Cityname group’s “Next read-meet” thread. (Yes, it’s a dummy example. Don’t click it, please.)

- Then scroll down to the post you want to reply to, and then reply. It’s only one extra step, but it saves on lots of irritation for the other subscribers to the group, and it ensures that your message gets read by the people following that topic.
And yes, please delete the unnecessary text of the message you’re replying to, as described in Item 5.

9. To those of you subscribed via the “No email” option.

10. RTFM*

Before asking any questions, either of the group as a whole or directly to the managers, new members are reminded that there is a Frequently Answered Questions page on the Caferati site. Please read it, particularly the section that has a bunch of read-meet-related queries, (and more specifically the sections on readmeets, for first-timers, for nervous or bashful first-timers and about read-meet writing themes and well, the whole section). It’s not very long; honest. When you ask questions that have already been answered there, it gets on our nerves, and could result in you be being treated with some, well, impatience.

* Read The FAQS, Miz/Mister.

If you have doubts about any of these guidelines, please send a message to the group’s moderators.

You can do so via the “About this group” link on the right. Click on that link, then scroll down to the header that says “Group email,” and next to it you will see a link that says “Send email to the owner.” Click on that, and type out our message in the next page. Please use an explanatory subject line and be brief.

If you have any suggestions on points that can be added to this document, please write to caferati at gmail dot com, with the subject line “Newsgroup etiquette.”

If you have any tips and tricks and workarounds for getting the best out of Google Groups, do please mail those to us as well, to caferati at gmail dot com, with the subject line “Newsgroup tips.” We’ll put them all together, with attribution to you for your suggestions, naturally, and either post them to all the groups or create a central resource on the Caferati site.