Before subscribing to the L.A. 2600 mailing list, you should be familiar with some basic etiquette. This mailing list has been around for quite a while, and many of these rules may seem confusingly archaic if you've grown up in a world of broadband Internet connections and feature-packed e-mail clients, but since the mailing list's subscribers read the list on a wide variety of clients and connections, these rules are still applicable.

First, some technical guidelines:

• Turn off HTML mail.
  Those of us with full-featured e-mail clients really don't want to have to squint to read your fancy purple cursive font on a rainbows-and-unicorns background, and those of us who read the list on our phones or in pine would rather like to avoid having to manually read all of the markup that you can't see.


• Send mail only in ASCII.
  This is important for many of the same reasons as turning off HTML mail, except that if you send something in Unicode, then your message goes from being merely annoying to read to being completely impossible to read for some subscribers. Furthermore, not all e-mail clients automatically linewrap; reading incredibly long lines of text is tedious, especially on high-resolution widescreen monitors. To this end, please make sure your e-mail client linewraps your outgoing messages at 72 characters.


• Turn off your device advertisement signature.
  You know the one: "Sent from my Blackberry® Wireless Device on the Sprint® Now Network™" or (god forbid) "Sent from my iPhone" -- we don't actually care whether you have the latest and greatest mobile phone or whether you're still using pine on a sparcstation, but advertising it is seen as, at best, ignorant, and at worse, douchebaggery.


• Never send attachments to the list.
  Yes, it may be very helpful for us to see a photograph or diagram of the thing you're trying to get help with, but rather than eating up all the mailing list server's bandwidth by having it re-send your two megabyte picture to a hundred fifty different people (and clogging up every single one of those people's inboxes with your attachment), host the damn thing somewhere and send a URL instead.

And, second, the more social side of netiquette (the kind for which there is no checkbox to check or option to set in a config file):

• Don't Flame
  Flaming is lame. If you are going to do it, do it off the list so we don't have to watch you behave like a boob. One thing to keep in mind regarding flaming, though: there will be people on this list who are more skilled than you and there will be people on this list who are less skilled than you. Don't fall into the age-old hacker trap of flaming those less skilled than you in an attempt to gain the respect of those who know more than you. It dosen't work that way; all it does is guarantee that NO ONE will ever respect you, regardless of skill.


• Don't Discuss Anything Illegal
  Use common sense. While yes, 2600 is a hacker zine, we do need to show a certain amount of tact when discussing certain things. We're not saying you can't discuss the legality of something or talk about exploits, but "who wants to break into _____.com with me?" or "I broke into a telco van last night" or the ever-so-popular "anyone on this list smoke pot? I have like 3 oz. I want to sell" are generally bad ideas. Reasons for this are obvious: We don't want to see you get busted, and we also don't want to see list members get investigated because of someone's dumb comments. Remember, this is an open list, meaning anyone can join (and we do mean ANYONE), so dont say anything in here that you wouldn't be comfortable saying directly to
  1. Your parents
  2. Your boss
  3. Law enforcement
  4. Your teachers
  5. etc.
  As with the nature of an open list, you never know who might be reading. Think first. As the wise man says, "better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."


• Don't Spam
  If you don't know what spam is: spam is unsolicited e-mail. Virtual junk mail. Everyone hates getting spam, so don't send it. If you spam the list, you'll get flamed and/or unsubscribed. It's that simple.


• Keep The Noise Down
  The mailing list is a discussion forum. It is not IRC, Instant Messaging, or Twitter. Discussions on the list tend to be somewhat slower-paced and longer-form. Think of the mailing list as the electronic version of a formal discussion where each party takes turns giving five-minute long speeches, and IRC, AIM, and Twitter as the high school lunch table where everyone chats mindlessly about inconsequential nonsense. Both forms of communication are useful and important, but you will irritate a great many people if you generate lots of useless noise on the mailing list. We have an IRC channel for that.


• Reply On-List Unless Requested Otherwise
  If someone asks a question on the mailing list and you have a response, make an effort to give that response on the mailing list. While responding to the original poster by messaging them on IRC, AIM, Twitter, and the like accomplishes the goal of answering that person's question, it deprives the other list subscribers the chance to learn from your answer. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, especially when the poster requests that replies be sent directly instead of to the list; in those cases, it's generally a bad idea not to follow the poster's request.

In short, use some basic common sense, think before you hit "send," and you'll probably do just fine.

You may find it advantageous to lurk on the mailing list for a while before sending your first message -- doing so will give you a far better idea of the common topics of discussion and the personalities involved, and makes it less likely that you'll inadvertently step on someone's toes.

Finally, if you're planning on asking a technical question, you may find this page very useful.

To subscribe to the L.A. 2600 mailing list, send e-mail to majordomo@la2600.org with only the words "subscribe la2600" in the message body. You will then receive a confirmation email which you will need to read and reply to before your subscription becomes active.

Enjoy the list and all the knowledge and contacts you might gain from it.