A member recently flagged a query in its body as "urgent" and
another member posted a constructively critical suggestion not
to do that, citing the Statalist FAQ.
In fact, this is not one of the points mentioned in the FAQ.
The confusion probably arises because a couple of clicks away
from our FAQ is advice in another document, which is pretty
firm on this point:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#urgent
Most of us work at least sometimes under extreme pressure
and certainly understand that things can become urgent for
a Statalist poster.
I think the best advice, however, is that claiming urgency
is usually counter-productive. The number of people it irritates
is probably greater than the number of people it inspires
to sympathy. And even though the people irritated might have
deleted the posting anyway, anything that raises the stress
levels even a little is rather unwelcome.
I don't think anyone wants to ban anything on Statalist,
but certain kinds of posting promote the aims of Statalist
well and other kinds don't do that well.
For completeness, going private because you don't want
to do this in public generally won't help you either
unless you know you are emailing a good personal friend!
This is just for the record, and almost wasn't sent. I particularly
ask that neither party should feel they need to add anything
to what has been said already.
Nick
[email protected]
(Statalist FAQ maintainer)
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