Mailing list rules

This is the first file you should be reading before doing any posts on PHP mailing lists. 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 mailing lists lets us do this. Thus, following some basic rules with regards to mailing list 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:

Respect other people working on the project.
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.
Make sure you pick the right mailing list for your posting. Please review the descriptions on the mailing list overview page. When in doubt ask a friend or someone you trust on IRC.
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.
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.
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.
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:

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.
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.
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.
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.

Happy hacking,

PHP Team

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