ABINIT Discussion Forums

The ABINIT Forums are available for fruitful information exchange among ABINITioners, thanks to the UCL system and the administrators' hard work.

Now the number of the accounts in the forum is quite large, from many countries, i.e. GLOBAL. Since our "common sense" may differ from country to country, we need to establish the etiquette to keep the Forum effective. Thus 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) little as possible.

The ABINIT forum netiquette will be :

• 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.
  
  • Q: How do I find relevant documents for my questions ?"
    
  • A: Follow this FAQ !
    
  
  
• Try to make your post "beautiful" as possible. Specifically speaking,
  
  • 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)...
    
  • Do not cite posts that are not relevant to your post.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.
    
  • Please avoid two-byte characters in your e-mails. (Especially for Asian subscribers, e.g. Chinese characters for "month", "date", "year" etc.).
    
  • Please stick to PLAIN TEXT format for posting.
    
  
  
• Try to make your post "small" as possible. Specifically speaking,
  
  • Whole/complete Input files should be attached (if applicable), rather than whole Log/Outputs. Make a good summary about your results: Specific & Concise. Follow the spirit described in the FAQ: http://www.abinit.org/ABINIT/Infos/FAQ.html#NoResponce, http://www.abinit.org/community/?text=bug_report. Just a small, relevant portion (e.g. ending part) of Log/Output files could be cited.
    
  • 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)
    
  • If you might have attachment over 500KByte, do not try to attach ! The attachment will be refused. Instead ...
    
    • You might put your files to an anonymous ftp server. Our anonymous ftp site "ftp.abinit.org/pub/incoming" is available for this purpose.(NB: for security reasons, you must give the full path of your file for distribution. See the FAQ.)
      
    • 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, many posts may be overlooked in our forum, once we have too heavy traffic.
      
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Please remember, the forums are not for so-called "user-support"; we should also recall, "Nobody is paid to give a service to the ABINIT community." Let us put aside the idea, "What can ABINIT/ABINITioners do for me (free-of-charge) ?" Let us think this way, "What can I do for ABINIT/ABINITioners ?" and make positive contributions. If you wonder why you do not have any response, please read the FAQ. Please do not reiterate your questions just for the aim to draw our attentions; it would not be effective, because your posts will be rightfully ignored as SPAM..

Previous version of nettiquette for Mailing lists, with additional links: http://www.abinit.org/community/netiquette/?searchterm=netiquette