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This article was originally published in the July 2001 edition of Forward, the Newsletter of the UK Chapter of the STC. Copyright © STC and David Farbey 2001. This version has been edited for online use. Somr of the information contained in this article may be out-of-date, and some links may no longer work.
Some employers have begun to be concerned about the amount of time their staff spend connected to the internet or using email. Although many employers still take a relaxed approach, others regard email and internet access as time-wasting and costly and are introducing restrictive policies. Some staff now have to justify their use of email and the internet before access is granted in the way that they would have to justify the cost of a magazine subscription or a training course.
Email can be a great way of swapping Bill Gates jokes or chatting with friends and family across the globe, but it can also be a great way of keeping up with your profession and solving technical problems. There are a number of email discussion groups that are run by technical writers and for technical writers that can help you do your job. Many groups offer technical writers fast, friendly and free advice about a particular activity such as help authoring, or about a specific tool such as Adobe Acrobat. Many list contributors are expert users, often including (in the case of commercial products) some of the engineers and who designed and wrote the original code. If I ever needed to show my employer justification for email access, I would be able to cite plenty of occasions when I had been able to keep working only because someone on an email discussion group had offered a solution to my problem.
The internet grew from a system that was designed to allow scientists and technicians to exchange technical information. The internet was a user-led community, and the exchange of email and messages was always a priority. Long before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, internet users were using Usenet newsgroups to exchange ideas. The designations of Usenet groups always include a top-level indication of the area of interest such as comp. for computing topics and rec. for recreational topics. The top-level indicator alt. (meaning alternative) has become infamous for some of its bizarre and controversial subjects.
Usenet is still there, with thousands of newsgroups on every possible subject. If your ISP doesn't provide a newsgroup or Usenet server, you can access newsgroups over the World Wide Web through the Google Groups site which has recently taken over the more well know Deja News service.
Unfortunately, many newsgroups suffer from unsolicited bulk commercial mailings (spam). More unfortnately still, there is a strong prossibility that any email address you use to post a message to a newsgroup will be harvested by spammers, and you will start to receive unsolicited commercial mail in your own inbox.
Usenet newsgroups require you to go to read and post messages on a specific server. Many more mailing lists work on an email basis, with messages delivered to your inbox. When you post a message to the list, it is delivered to the inbox of every subscriber. Most email discussion lists offer administrtaive options which allow you to suspend your subscription temporarily (often called the NOMAIL command), useful for when you are on vacation, or to receive all the days contributions in a single message (often called the DIGEST command).
Some commercial software vendors run lists for their users. Some of these lists offer access to technical suppport, and others are one-way announcement lists, which send news and information from the company to registered users.
Some email discussion lists offer Web-based access as an alternative to delivering emails to your inbox. You can read mail, check the message archive, and post messages from a web page if you prefer not to clutter up your inbox. You can set up a web-based email discussion group for free on Yahoo Groups which is exactly what the European group of STC chapters has done (details later).
Email discussion groups have their own etiquette. A new member is always a newbie, which is by no means a derogatory term. Many lists have message archive or a web page with a list of Frequently Answered Questions, and many lists send an introductory message to all new members, with technical instructions and etiquette rules. It is a good idea to lurk on the list for a while - that is, join the list and read messages without joining in by posting to the list - until you get the feel of the conversations on the list. When you do start to post messages, make sure you introduce yourself briefly to other members.
If you want to be respected in an email discussion group, take care not to flame any other poster by being rude or insulting. Never use an ad hominem argument to attack a list member because you disagree with their opinion. And never shout - anything you write in CAPITALS is considered shouting!
Here are some of the technical writing lists that I have taken part in from time to time. If you can't find a list on a topic that interests you, try looking at the Mailing Lists section on Peter Ring's User Friendly Manuals Web site. The list was originally compiled by Mark Levinson, former President of the Israel STC Chapter, and now an Editorial Board member for the STC quarterly Technical Communication.
The techwr-l list (pronounced tech-whirl) is the grand-daddy of all tech writing lists. It has over 4,000 subscribers, and is managed with a knowledgable but firm hand by Eric Ray. Anything that is even mildly off topic is pounced upon ferociously, but on the other hand, the list archives are a goldmine of information. The traffic on this list is very high, and a Digest subscription is a good idea. The list has its own website, which has feature articles as well as subscription information and archive access.
Framers is the list for FrameMaker users. This list has a searchable archive, and you don't need to subscribe in order to search. If you use Adobe Acrobat, then you should look at the lists available at the PDF Zone.
If you are responsible for creating online help of any kind, you should consider joining the Help Authoring Tools and Techniques list known as HATT. Another useful group which has it home on Yahoo Group is the WebWorks Publisher users group. By the way, if you register at Yahoo Groups you will be able to subscribe to as many lists there as you want with the same member details.
The most popular arena for information on Microsoft Word is not an email discussion list, but a collection of more than thirty groups under the microsoft.public.word. hierarchy. The names of the groups are informative, for example microsoft.public.word.docmanagement or microsoft.public.word.formattinglongdocs.
Many STC Special Interest Groups - SIGs - have their own lists as well. For example, there is a lively discussion list for the Lone Writers SIG. (Lone Writers are those who work on their own or in very small departments.) As many of you know, the UK Chapter has its own email list [from December 2001 the UK Chapter list is hosted at Yahoo Groups], and you may have read in an earlier issue of Forward about the new European Chapters mailing list.
If techwr-l is the most regimented discussion list for technical writers, then TechComm is the least regimented. In fact its rules state that the only topic that is off-topic is discussing whether something is off-topic or not. The list describes itself as the bar where members can relax while the serious conference takes place on techwr-l. If you would like to discuss anything from pregnant chads to Britney Spears in the company of other tech writers, you should join TechComm.
As well as being a source of information, email discussion groups can create a sense of camaraderie, where group members share a common interest or work under similar situations. The Lone Writers list has a very strong family feeling to it, and a group of list members worked together to present a panel discussion at last May's STC conference in Chicago. TechComm, with all its jokiness and banter, is a very supportive group as well.
As the UK Chapter is very spread out geographically, it might be a nice idea if we could get together more regularly by using our mailing list. We might even be able to have a mailing list home page on our Chapter Web site, with pictures and biographies of list members. If you think that's a good idea, or even if you think it's a bad idea, why don't you write to the Chapter list about it, and we can have a discussion!
David Farbey
Copyright © STC and David Farbey 2001. All rights reserved. Links to this article, and properly acknowledged quotations from this article which include a link, are welcomed.
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