Responding Offline
In almost all cases, subscribers must respond online to any issue. That means that you are required and expected to respond to the entire group, and you may not respond directly to the person who wrote the query.
However, there are exceptions. In certain limited cases subscribers must respond directly to the writer, as follows:
Please keep in mind that such instances of answering off-line are rare indeed. Usually everybody on the group should share and exchange information together.
We have all joined these groups because we want to work on issues as a group. By communicating directly with a specific person in the group, you are unfairly denying other participants this information. They cannot respond. You are destroying the general discussion by eliminating the others in the group.
Think about any discussion that you have had recently. If everybody was able to join in the discussion, then it was successful. On the other hand, if some people started to form their own small groups or cliques, then the main discussion died. Only the small group discussion remained.
That is not the purpose for our discussion groups. It is a violation of the basic guidelines of our discussion. It negates the logic behind instituting the discussion groups in the first place.
Please do not carry on offline discussions with subscribers on these groups!
Find out more about moderating these groups
Find out more general guidelines that apply to all of our Jewish groups
Find out more about other Jewish and Hebrew groups
Are you required to read this webpage for a course? Do NOT print out the article. It is copyrighted.
Your exercise for this article is as follows:
Many issues were raised in this group. Were they all included in these guidelines?
Copyright © David Grossman. World rights reserved. This article may not be printed, forwarded, reproduced, or copied in any way or in any medium without written permission from David Grossman.
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