At 12:05 AM 30/03/2001 +0930, David & Sue Harper wrote:
It appears to me the only way to get anything out of this lot is to come
up with something controversial.
Unfair. The people here who know about Quail Thrushes and Crescent
Honeyeaters (and I'm not one of them) are not, in general, the ones who
indulge in controversy. They don't indulge in much at all, at least not on
this mailing list! They're too darned busy.
There was a classic message posted to one of the Usenet newsgroups with the
title "Please Do My Homework For Me". Guess what? Most people won't do
that. I'm not talking specifically about the Quail Thrush and Crescent
Honeyeater questions, but there are a proportion of questions on
birding-aus that anyone with modest research skills and a halfway decent
search engine can answer for themselves.
I think birding-aus subscribers are extraordinarily generous when the
request is specific. Many people don't have the time to write an essay,
particularly just because someone else has asked them to.
I delete over half of the posts to birding-aus based on the subject line
alone. It's a fairly high volume group and I couldn't keep up any other
way. I suspect I'm not alone and vague subject lines will lose you many
readers. To get specific, "Disappearing Crescent Honeyeaters" doesn't look
like a question to me.
To summarise:
1. Do your homework first
2. Ask short, specific questions
3. Choose subject lines carefully
Cheers
Paul Foxworthy
---- Coherent Software ------------- http://www.cohsoft.com.au/ ----
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Aust. Family History Compendium at http://www.cohsoft.com.au/afhc/
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