So you have a working Gale installation, you've sent yourself private puffs (and received them!) to make sure the installation works, and you're contemplating entering the community of public Gale users. This document describes what you should know before jumping into the fray.
A loosely interconnected group of students, ex-students, and generally tech-oriented people. Many Gale users attend or used to attend Caltech, although the proportion is slowly dropping as the community expands. Because of the high activation cost required to start using Gale, the community tends to attract primarily the technically-minded early-adopter type.
Pictures of most of the Gale denizens have been collected in the Gale mugbook.
The public Gale area is a freeflowing conversation that spans multiple simultaneous threads over a time span of minutes to days. The topics under discussion stem from the interests of the people involved, and they shift as new people enter and leave the conversation.
Popular topics in the past have included programming problems (language questions, compiler issues, systems stuff); interesting science and technology tidbits forwarded from Slashdot or elsewhere; long debates about politics or economics; rants about the web/Microsoft/Netscape/Gale; personal crises; science fiction; and all things Linux. The conversation is heavily biased towards technical matters, because the participants are primarily technical.
Unlike Slashdot, we don't have a lot of trolls or flames; however, we do employ judicious amounts of sarcasm and dark humor. Watch for sarcasm tongs (double-quotes) and subtle irony. We also use plenty of acronyms; here is a list of common ones.
It is considered good form to puff a public message to "pub.me.$USER@ofb.net" (where $USER is replaced with your own username) introducing yourself. Tell us how you discovered Gale, what you're interested in, and just plain say hi.
You might be webstalked; we're curious about newcomers and we want to know what you look like and what you do. Feel free to give us the URL of a picture of you; we'll find it eventually anyway. Consider it a rite of passage into the community.
There are plenty of ways to annoy the denizens of Gale. You'll undoubtedly discover them on your own, but here are some ideas to get you started.
Gale-related questions are the exception to this rule; if the system isn't working the way you expect it to, Gale is the appropriate forum for asking about it. Just be sure to read the FAQ first.
No one knows the answer to your question.
The question is not interesting enough to answer (i.e., no one cares about the answer enough to bother looking it up).
People are busy working/sleeping/eating/whatever instead of wasting their time on Gale.
If you ask a question in the middle of another heated discussion, people may forget to respond to it. Note that the heated discussion may be taking place in a location that you don't even subscribe to.
Have you introduced yourself?