The ABINIT Forums are available for fruitful information exchange among ABINITers, thanks to the UCL system and the administrators’ hard work.
The number of accounts on the forum is quite large, and you come from many countries, i.e. GLOBAL. Since our “common sense” may differ from country to country, we need to establish a modus operandi to keep the Forum effective. Those who want to post messages (esp. questions) to the Forum should follow a sort of etiquette (“netiquette”) to make them most effective, and burden our limited resource (“humanware” as well as hardware) as little as possible.
The ABINIT forum netiquette will be :
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Before posting, please check relevant documents (the FAQ etc.) the ABINIT source archives (src_tests_*.tar.gz) as well as the Forum and mailing list archives.
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Q: How do I find relevant documents for my questions ?"
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A: Follow this FAQ !
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Try to make your post “beautiful” as possible. Specifically speaking,
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Give a meaningful Subject to your post that may help us to find/remember your post easily. Avoid “HELP”,“PLEASE”,“Question”, (BLANK), which are useless and provide no information (and do not improve your chances of getting an answer, on the contrary)…
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Do not cite posts that are not relevant to your post. When you want to start a new thread, please do not post by follow-up (reply). This is important, for the forum to make the most use of the “thread” idea.
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Please avoid two-byte characters in your e-mails. (Especially for Asian subscribers, e.g. Chinese characters for “month”, “date”, “year” etc).
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Please stick to PLAIN TEXT format for posting.
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Try to make your post “small” as possible. Specifically speaking,
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Whole/complete Input files should be attached (if applicable), rather than whole Log/Outputs. Make a good summary about your results: Specific & Concise. Just a small (but complete enough) relevant portion (e.g. ending part) of Log/Output files could be cited.
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If you still want to attach an output/log (as a whole), please compress with bzip2, gzip, zip etc. (NB: this is not effective for binary files, of course)
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If you might have attachment over 500KByte, do not try to attach it ! The attachment will be refused. Instead …
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You might put your files to an upload server, fileshare, google docs, dropbox etc
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It will also be a good idea to provide your WEB page. You can put your outputs (and images) FREELY on your home page. You could suggest by saying, “Please visit my homepage http://www.foo.foo/ for the details.” Having your own WEB page may be more effective than posting your questions daily; we should remember, some posts may be overlooked in our forum, if we have too heavy traffic.
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If you wonder why you do not have any response, please read the FAQ. Please do not reiterate your questions just to attract attention; it would not be effective, because your posts will be rightfully ignored as SPAM.
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Please give feedback when you obtain suggestions/comments. Making a good summary will be welcome ! It will be reused as a part of the forum FAQ. In this way, you have a chance to contribute to ABINIT.
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Please remember, the forum is not for full fledged “user support”; nobody is paid for this service to the ABINIT community. Ask not “What can ABINIT developers do for me (free-of-charge) ?” but rather “What can I do for ABINIT/ABINITers ?” and make positive contributions.