In this exercise you will engage in some discussion.
Compose and post meaningful followups to at least two of the other topics (threads) in your tutorial group.
Your postings should be followups and must not start a new thread.
Your followups can be either to other followups or to another main topic (new thread) posting.
Please follow up in the same language as the original posting. If the original posting is in German, follow up in German. If the original posting is in English, follow up in English.
To gain credit for this exercise, you must contribute to meaningful discussion in at least two of the threads in your tutorial group.
Post any test postings to the newsgroup tu-graz.test.
If you make a mistake and would like to correct your followup posting:
We will grade the (chronologically) last two followups you make before the deadline.
Use a proper newsreader (a client installed on your local computer). Thunderbird is a good newsreader. Do not use a web news interface or a mobile newsreader app for the INM exercises.
Outlook Express and Opera are not good newsreaders. Some of their "bugs" can be reconfigured, some can not. If you use one of these as your newsreader, you are likely to lose points in this exercise.
You must post using your real name, composed of your first name plus your surname, for example "Keith Andrews". Your real name should be written using only characters from 7-bit ASCII (no umlauts), for example "Juergen Weiss".
So that we can identify you uniquely, you must post either:
From field,
Reply-To field
and a secondary email address in the From field, or
From field or
Reply-To field, which you have previously disclosed
to your tutor by email from your TU Graz email account.
In any case, you should always use working email addresses, not masked addresses which have to be hand-edited to reply to.
Only use the Reply-To field if replies should go to a
different email address than the one given in the
From field. Specifying exactly the same email address in
both the From and the Reply-To fields is
redundant and is considered to be bad practice.
You should followup existing threads, rather than start new threads.
Your followups should retain the original subject line (in 7-bit ASCII), unless you change the topic of discussion (see the lecture notes).
If the posting you are following up to has non 7-bit ASCII characters in its subject line, you do not have to correct them yourself manually in your followup. You can correct them if you wish, or you can just leave them there. We will not deduct points for this.
The body of your posting should be in UTF-8. Make sure your newsreader
is set up to use UTF-8 as the character encoding. Check by sending a
test posting to the newsgroup
tu-graz.test.
Your followup should be relevant to the discussion and in your own words.
Your followups should be in plain text only.
You should quote sensibly and selectively from previous postings. Do not full quote. Do not quote previous signatures. If you do not know what this means, read the lecture notes.
You should use a concise attribution line to identify the source of any quoted text.
Do not use lines longer than 72 characters.
The only exception is for URLs which are longer than 72 characters. If you have such a URL, try and find the shortest URL from the same original source which still works (do not use a URL shortening service). If this URL is still more than 72 chars, that is OK.
Your followups should have a valid signature.
For the purposes of this course, do not sign your messages with a cryptographic signature such as PGP or GnuPG. They add unnecessary clutter and many newsreaders do not handle cryptographic signatures properly.
Be aware that if you repeatedly post slightly different versions of the same posting from the same IP address (say, while testing), the TU Graz Cancelbot may think you are spamming and delete your postings automatically. If that happens to you, try posting from a different IP address, or wait half a day or so for the Cancelbot's working set to be filled with newer postings.
Remember that the TU Graz newsgroups are public. Anyone can read them and they are publicly archived and indexed. You should not post anything that you would not want your parents (or the authorities, etc.) to read. Also, do not include personal information in your signature which you do not want publicly known. For example, I would not want to publish my MatrNr or personal telephone number by including them in my .sig in a newsgroup posting.
And all of the other relevant points in the lecture notes.
I know that it is possible both to forge postings to make them appear to be from someone else and to cancel other people's postings. Let's just say that I would take a dim view of that kind of behaviour...