Now that's advice and a half!

From a forum I sometimes visit:

I admit I have not been hanging around CAA much recently. Where I have been hanging out instead is in a programming community. In the programming world, we have something called the Robustness Principle, which is an important principle to know if you want to build a robust system of software. Its original words were as follows:

Originally posted by Jon Postel (RFC 761): TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

In other words, a well-designed program will accept many variations in the format of its input without complaining, and will output in a very strictly-controlled and predictable format. This makes it much easier for two programs to work together without one of them choking on the other's data. You might think that it would work just fine to mandate that all programs are strict (or liberal) in their input and output. The problem with this is that programs are written by programmers, programmers are people, and people are imperfect; therefore their programs are imperfect. In order for imperfect programs to work well together in a robust system, they must follow the Robustness Principle. That way, if one program has a bug, another program can compensate for it, and the system as a whole still works.

If I have kept your attention span, and you have read the preceding paragraph, then it should be clear that the Robustness Principle can apply to communities of people too. Don't hold others to a standard higher than yours. Don't even hold others to a standard that's the same as yours. You should hold others to a standard that is lower than yours. Equivalently, hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold others. Be strict in what you say; be liberal in what you accept from others.

Sounds a lot like "Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry" or "Honor one another above yourselves." At times, if the input is really bad, it'll get tough, and suddenly it becomes, "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse," which admittedly is extremely hard.