Moderators Note: Reminder of Posting Rules

[James Pulley]

As we have a number of new users to the group this is a friendly reminder of items which will result in your posts not making it to the group

1. Multiposting.   If under moderation you have two or more questions of the identical nature your posts will be rejected.   As all of the moderators are volunteers and have primary job responsibilities elsewhere it may take up to 48 hours to moderate and accept your post.  Individuals with strong track records for posting eventually escape moderation.  All new users' posts are held under moderation until a track record can be established.     There are generally two ways that multiposting occurs
1. Someone posts a question under moderation,doesn't see it appear in the forum and then continues to post the same message muitiple times until they give up.  Imagine what this looks like in the moderation screen.   A big mess.
2. Hitting [Reply All] to a message from the forum instead of just [Reply].  This winds up generating two posts to the group.  The first is for the default REPLY-TO: address field in the email header, which is lr-loa...@googlegroups.com for all email sent to the list.  The second is for the explicit address of the group on the TO: field in the original header.   This also creates a SPAM headache under moderation
2. Posting off topic.   If you have a lost cat that needs to find its way home, a car for sale, you are looking for a date for yourself or someone you know, have a job posting for a non-LoadRunner related position or have a question on a tool other that one produced by Mercury or HP for the purposes of performance testing (i.e. JMETER, Rational Performance Tester, OpenSTA, Grinder, Borland/Silk Performer, SOASTA, Bob's homegrown cURL engine....) this is not the appropriate forum for this question.  If this is your first post after signing up only minutes before then the odds are high that you may be banned from he forum altogether.
3. Thread Hijack.   If you hijack a thread with a new question or reply to an existing thread, changing the subject and posting it as new then your posts are likely to be removed.   We don't always find these in moderation, but as soon as they post then the thread ID which is located in the header of the previous question will cause that thread to become active to the top of the list on the web site.     The Thread ID is a unique field in the email header which allows email clients (and the website) to organize multiple email messages into groups that belong together.   When you wipe an existing message and post a new one by replying to an existing thread then you destroy the integrity of the subject grouping.   When you post a new question to the group, please do so with a virgin email message to avoid this issue.   Repeat offenders of this practice have been banned from this and other forums
4. Shotgun questions.    Over the past 18 months there has been a growth in what are known as "shotgun posts" for LoadRunner questions all across the Internet.  This is where a user will simultaneously (or nearly so) post the same question to multiple forums hoping for a response from someplace.   This is creating a burden for several classes in the community but who it impacts most directly are existing users who are researching issues.   With the same question posted in multiple locations it has become nearly impossible to determine which thread is "reference" for research purposes.   Multiple threads may contain portions of the final solution but because in 100% of these cases the shotgun poster does not post the final answer to all locations then it becomes extraordinarily difficult for those who are engaged in research to determine a solution.  Because of the damage this "shotgun posting" is causing to the user community at large the moderators of this forum have partnered with moderators on SQAForums, YahooGroups, LinkedIn and Facebook to minimize the impact by removing duplicate questions (including any answers) and rejecting shotgun posts under moderation in an effort to cause a single thread to become "reference" for all responses.   Repeat shotgun posters face the risk not only of having their questions removed, but being permanently banned from multiple forums    

 If you must post to multiple locations then first exhaust all of your options in the first location with responses and then post a question based upon what you have learned at the prior forum.   Always link back to the first thread to allow readers to understand what you have learned and how your question has changed since your first request.   If you have received no responses to your first posting in a different forum then please delete the orphaned message to remove the possibility that someone's research will be stymied in the future by a question with no response and so your questions are not automatically deleted as Shotgun Post SPAM in this and other forums.

Thank you for your time this morning,   

James Pulley

Moderator, lr-loadrunner Google Groups (among many other forums)
Host, PerfBytes - http://www.perfbytes.com

CTO, NewCOE - http://www.newcoe.com

[James Pulley]

A gentle reminder of posting rules as the number of violations in this and other forums is on the rise;

Moderator