[gmx-users] Language & manners on the list

[lindahl at sbc.su.se]

Hi everybody,

We're almost done setting up a new server wiki.gromacs.org where it
will be possibly to have more extensive discussions/tutorials both
about introductory and advanced topics. Special thanks to
Dallas/Mark/David and others for offering to help with this.

Hopefully this will get rid of some of the more common questions on
the list. When it is up I'll add a line in the footer of all mails
about it, as well as a paragraph in the welcome mail people get when
subscribing.

However, even if some of those mails are stupid/naive/written in
horrible english it can sometimes be better to ignore them rather than
trying to help with tongue-in-cheek answers.  Internet newbies won't
understand the irony anyway, and fluency in english isn't a
requirement (phew, that's lucky, considering the Gromacs code is still
sprinkled with dutch comments :-)

Having said that, I also want to remind the newbies that nobody is
paid to provide support here, but we still have a handful of advanced
users that do an amazing and very patient work of repeatedly answering
the same basic questions. If you get a reply with an ironic twist,
remember that the alternative would have been to ignore your post
completely (like everone else on the list did) - at least you got a
pointer in right direction this way.

Anyway, hopefully all this will improve when we can just reply 'wiki' :-)

Cheers,

Erik